While searching for methodologies to address this issue, I came across a book that provides good insights on how to start by organizing the question before actually beginning to answer it. The book is Customer Experience: Future Trends and Insights by Colin Shaw, from which I adapt some ideas here.
We can be quite Cartesian here and start addressing the issue by dividing our object of doubt, in this case, the mind of the individual undergoing a particular experience, into parts.
One suggestion for division would be into 4 parts:
Pre-experience
Intention of the experience
Memory of the experience
Interaction with the experience
Here, I will only address number one, pre-experience, which includes the prior psychological baggage that the individual brings to an experience, containing biases, intentions, and associations generated by the experience.
Bias
In a famous experiment conducted by Hastorf and Cantril[1], it was demonstrated how bias can manipulate the facts of an experience. The study used a recording of a rather rough American football game between two American colleges. This recording was shown to students from these same colleges, and when asked which team was to blame for the violent game, each college pointed to the opposing college as responsible. In other words, even though the same video was watched by both groups, what changed was that this reality was perceived differently and biased by the groups.
Even when a company (Macy's, in the USA) wants to help its customers by notifying them that their account may be used fraudulently by someone else, if the employee making the call is calling from one of those call centers located in India, for example, the customer, instead of being grateful for the company's kindness in warning them about the fraud, ends up becoming more suspicious simply because the representative is an Indian on the other side of the world.
Of course, bias can have its good side and can become quite apparent when things go wrong. If a reputable company, like Apple, for example, makes a mistake, people tend to think that this is normal, that mistakes happen, and that’s okay. But if the problem is with a less popular company, they won’t be as generous and understanding.
The emotional and subconscious impact of people's biases on their perceptions and expectations is clear, showing that they are not entirely rational, with their behavior influenced by these feelings.
Expectation
What people expect from an experience ends up influencing their perception of it. If we think of a doctor's waiting room, we already know that waits are long, so a 30-minute wait won’t be as unpleasant as the same amount of time waiting in a bank line, especially when the car is parked in a no-parking zone since it would just be “a quick stop at the ATM.”
Thus, something interesting happens here; after all, changing expectations can be a great opportunity to improve an experience, but there is also an inherent risk when people's level of expectation rises. For example: Disneyland is famous for the friendliness of its employees, and because of this, any lack of friendliness from an employee tends to take on large proportions, at least much larger than a bad joke made by a street vendor at a market stall.
Therefore, when changing expectations, one must always be attentive to ensure that the change does not take the opposite direction of what is desired.
Association
The brain is made up of a network of neural connections, and because of this, when we feel or think about something, we end up making connections with other relevant experiences. This is why our relationship with a product, service, or experience depends not only on the physical interaction with them but also on the associations generated by each person.
Coca-Cola is not sold just as a soft drink. If it were the opposite, how could one explain that it sells more than Pepsi, given that the latter is preferred in blind taste tests? There is something associated with brands, products, and services that goes beyond their utility.
This then creates the opportunity to change the idea that people have about a product, for example, without modifying the product itself. Take the case of the British energy drink Lucozade, which was associated with illness due to the campaign “Lucozade helps in recovery,” and tripled its sales in the UK with the same product but changing the marketing campaign to “Lucozade recovers your lost energy.”
Therefore, it is essential to understand how these associations are made to ensure that they are always aligned with the objective.
[1] 1954, cited in Plous, S (1993) The Psychology of Judgment and Decision-Making.
