Peak-End Theory
How to make people think positively about your product, even if it’s not perfect.
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Peak-End Theory
We want to tell you about the experience of one of our Crew members from a few years ago, something they still vividly remember.
All the way back in 2016, they were attending a conference in Bangkok and were meeting up with a friend to grab dinner. They met up in an area convenient for both (not a mall, as is often the case in Bangkok), but they didn’t have a specific restaurant in mind.
The weather was not on their side, and if you know anything about rain in Bangkok, it’s that when it rains, it usually pours. So, after quickly scanning the area, they saw a steakhouse and ran inside to try and get a table.
Luckily enough, a table was available.
And the steak was good, no complaints.
But then came dessert… And wow! The chocolate cake transformed that dining experience into one of the most memorable and pleasant experiences ever.
It made us think… Do restaurants use Peak-End Theory to serve desserts at the end of the meal so that diners rate their experience higher?
Before we continue, let’s clarify what Peak-End Theory (or Rule) is:
“The peak–end rule is a cognitive bias that impacts how people remember past events. Intense positive or negative moments (the “peaks”) and the final moments of an experience (the “end”) are heavily weighted in our mental calculus.”
Customers rarely remember the full experience of your product.
But they do remember the most intense moments (the peaks) and the end. And this phenomenon is grounded in research by Daniel Kahneman and Barbara Frederickson.
Here are some ideas for how you can apply this to your products and your marketing.
Three Tactics Based On The Peak-End Theory
1) Minimize negative peaks
An easy way to ensure someone has a good experience with a product is to minimize negative “peaks.”
Our favorite example? Amazon.
Amazon handles all customer complaints quickly and without fuss, so even when something is damaged, late, or not as expected, there is rarely a negative peak.
2) Make the end pleasant
It’s not just about the peak, but also about the end.
An enormous mistake for customer experience is making the end a negative peak.
Do you read The New York Times? They had one of the most notoriously annoying subscription cancellations flows that was even posted on Reddit under r/assholedesign.
This kind of near-impossible cancellation flow made the end experience with The New York Times as negative as it can get.
If you have a product you want people to use again, make it easy for them to cancel. And make sure they know they are welcome when they are ready to come back.
Don’t give them a passive-aggressive message like this.
3) Crafting the right kind of gift and giveaway offers
We marketers often like gifting customers “everything,” but that comes with risks.
A study from 2008 by Amy Do, Alexander Rupert, and George Wolford found that the order in which people were presented with two free gifts changed how they viewed the experience.
As you would expect, according to Peak-End Theory, people who received the worse gift after the better gift had a more negative experience.
So, when you craft a bundle as a gift or a giveaway, Peak-End Theory tells you to:
Make sure there are no negative products in there. If your customer has a negative reaction to any part of the gift, that negative peak will have a negative effect on the entire experience.
If there is a clear best product, strongly consider giving it away as the last gift.
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◀️ Speaking of Peak-End and making the end pleasant, according to this research posted in Ariyh, the end might not be the end. Giving refunds makes people 12.2% more likely to buy, 12.4% more satisfied with the experience, and it doesn’t increase product returns.
✖️ And then there was X. Twitter is turning into X, taking another step towards what Elon Musk called “the everything app.” We’re not sure how we feel about it yet. Feels a bit rushed, and we do like Twitter but if X improves on that, we’ll definitely give it a fair shot.
🌎 Although now mostly known for OpenAI, Sam Altman just launched another project called Worldcoin. The core product is its World ID, that’s supposed to be a “digital passport” to prove that its holder is a real human and not an AI bot.
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ICYMI, last week we talked about Mimicry.
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The “Positive Peaks” Crew.