What makes a customer experience memorable?

In this episode, Jacob Cass & Matt Davies speak with customer experience expert and author Si Elliott about the psychology behind how people experience, perceive and remember brands.

Drawing from his book, Customer Experience Thinking, Si explains how behavioural science can help brands create stronger customer relationships. They explore the role of expectations, emotion, identity, effort, personalisation and control, along with the small details that can shape an entire experience.

They also unpack some of the behavioural biases every brand strategist should understand, including loss aversion, framing, anchoring, social proof, the paradox of choice and the peak-end rule.

You’ll discover:

  • Why a customer’s memory of an experience may matter more than the experience itself
  • How first impressions influence everything that follows
  • Why offering more choice can make an experience worse
  • The difference between being personal and being personalised
  • How emotion and identity shape brand preference
  • Where AI can improve customer experience and where humans should lead

If you want to create brand experiences that feel more human, valuable and memorable, this conversation will change how you think about every customer interaction.

Get Si Elliot’s New Book: Customer Experience Thinking: How behavioural science helps you understand, connect and build deeper relationships.

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Transcript

Hello, folks, welcome to this episode of JUST Branding. Brands spend an absolutely enormous amount of time thinking about how they look, what they say, how they present themselves to the world. But we know that ultimately brands are experienced by human beings, by end consumers. And we know that those human beings sometimes, I would pretty much say all the time, are not really rational in the way that they think and behave. We’re all emotional beings, influenced by context and various other key things. So we’re not robots. So if we want to manage meaning, if we want to build brands, it’s so important that we get our heads around consumer behavior, customer behavior, you could call it, and behavioral science. Today, in this episode, we are exploring a simple question. What can behavioral science teach us about creating better customer and therefore brand experiences? And we have an amazing guest to go into this subject with. Today, we’re joined by Si Elliott, a customer experience expert who spent the last two decades exploring the intersection between digital progress and human connection. Si began his career in marketing and today co-owns creative agency, Diversity, and is the founder of customer experience consultancy, Fabrics, where he combines behavioral science with practical strategy to help organizations create experiences that genuinely resonate with people. On top of that, if that wasn’t enough, he’s also an award-winning guest lecturer at Nottingham Trent University here in the UK, the University of Nottingham and the Communication University of China, as well as sitting on academic advisory boards spanning business and psychology. And perhaps most relevantly, he is the author of a new book that’s just come out this year, Customer Experience Thinking, a practical guide to using behavioral science to build deeper, more meaningful customer relationships. Si, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for that introduction. There’s very little I can say now. I think you’ve pretty much cut off everything you’ve done.

Let’s wrap it up. Well, I think we could tuck into one small story, and that’s how we first met. Do you want to sort of, you know, open up that can of worms?

Yeah. So 2004, I think it was, our creative studio was a little bit overloaded with work. So we went out to some freelance designers here in Nottingham, and a very energetic young chap with a lot of hair arrived through the door. Did some fantastic work with us. So I can vouch that the work was very good. And we’ve been in touch ever since. And I think it’s always interesting when you have, and you’ve just reeled off a lot of things that I’ve done. And the reason I’ve done that is because I’ve been around for so long. But I think it’s really interesting when you have more than two decades of experience in a market, in an area, in a niche, to see the people that keep coming back into your, kind of revolving around your world and your ether as well, and your network. And yeah, it’s great to see what you’re doing. It’s fantastic to meet Jacob as well. And I’ve got a few questions for Jacob a little bit later on as well. That’s a whole different thing.

Well, thanks for so much for carving out some time. I think it was a couple of years ago, we were in a Starbucks and you mentioned this book that was coming out. And now it’s here. So congratulations on launching it. We’re going to get into that. But one thing I was just going to touch on, I think what’s interesting about our connection is that, in effect, we’ve both had, I would say similar, but different approaches in our career, which is that I think we’ve gone up the value ladder, if you like, in the sense of how are we really creating stuff that has real true meaning and value for customers? And coming from the design and creative side, that’s where my career has gone more into the strategy side. And I know yours has also, and slightly differently, but ultimately kind of ending up on that side of things, which is less about, I guess, the fonts, the colors and the shiny bits, and more about the true, for you, the customer experience that really kind of generates value.

Absolutely. Yeah. And I think you touched on the book, and I’m sure we’ll chat through that a little bit. And that was certainly a labor of love. I know you’re working on one at the moment. I know, Jacob, you’ve been through that process as well. And that was a commitment device. I just told everybody I’m writing a book, because eventually, every time you see someone, they go, how are you getting on with the book? You go, yeah, I need to complete that. But, you know, an absolute curse of optimism. I thought I’d have the book done in a year. It took three years. And hopefully, there’s some value that people can get out from that. But certainly, and I know we haven’t teed up the two letters of AI yet, but we’re never going to get through this without unscathed, without talking about that. That wasn’t even in my thinking when I started the book. But it’s certainly become more important. And the point you touched on now, for anybody working agency side, a designer, people at the moment that maybe have some worries about what’s happening in the world, that moving up the value chain and adding the thinking in is absolutely critical now. It’s never been more important. It’s never. And I think when we touch on what you guys do from a brand perspective, I genuinely think that now might be the most important time in history to get brand right.

Agreed. Well, look, before we tuck in some of that stuff, let’s just start with basics, right? Because we have a varied audience that tune in and we always like to lay some groundwork first. We love definitions on the JUST Branding Podcast just to start us off. So the book’s called Customer Experience Thinking. Perhaps we could get you to give us a definition of what that is. What is customer experience thinking?

Customer experience is just the perception of feelings that people have with the interactions or the experience they have with you, your product, your service or your brand. So in simple terms, that’s all it is and it lives in the mind of the customer. So we’re trying to influence that, but fundamentally, customer experience is always from the other side of the fence and a lot of brands think about what they’re delivering as customer experience rather than what’s been received and trying to fit that on its head and walk in their shoes a little bit more.

Love that. Love that. So why is that important, do you think, to having that kind of mindset around human behavior? Why is that important to creating those experiences for businesses and brands?

Well, let’s think about why does a business exist at all? It’s to serve someone and hopefully have a value exchange where you get compensated for that service to the other side. So I think modern marketing and certainly technology has really driven us down a line of thinking about conversion, thinking about this user, that metric, and we actually need to take a step back and go, we’re actually serving people at the end of the day. A lot of the work you guys will be doing in your day jobs is not just about selling to a business, it’s serving those people within the business. And I feel in marketing, we’re losing a little bit of sight on that. Certainly with big data, certainly when we look at, you know, think about the social platforms and the ability to reach such a large audience, I feel we’re starting to lose a little bit of connection with the fact that it’s the person on the other side that we’re serving. And the brands that do it super well, and I think are gonna be really successful moving forward, are those that keep that in mind and remember, I’m here to serve you. So my book is written to hopefully serve value to you, and therefore it’s worth the money you’ve paid for it, and it creates that value. So I’ve had to write it with you in mind, not in mind of just, this is what I want to say.

Right.

How did you come to the idea of writing a book?

Well, partially, partially there’s a big personal side to it. I’ve got two young daughters, and 11 and 14, they’re digital natives. They’re growing up in a world that is so different to the world I grew up in 40 odd years ago. And I now observe that and think, well, what they’re coming into, how well is it serving them versus they’re serving it? So how much is the technology the master rather than the other way around? So I was starting to just observe this and think about the marketing industry in general, and how we’re, as I say, starting to focus more on metrics, users, conversion rate, rather than delivering out to people. And that’s been accelerated in recent years, but from the start of the book, it was really looking at that and looking at this whole trend of, we’re more connected than ever, but potentially more lonely, we’re a lot more plugged in, there’s notifications going off, I feel it. When I think about starting out in a design creative studio here in Nottingham, I was doing two or three ad campaigns a week, and I used to wait for an ISDN line to slowly tick along, and that’s great. And now I look at the speed that my team are working at, the amount of notifications going off, if you’ve got Slack, if you’ve got Teams, WhatsApp’s going off, emails, people are expecting instant answers on. Everything’s ramping up, but we’ve still got these prehistoric brains that have been formed over thousands of years, and we’re not having hardware updates with our brains as quickly as the technology is. So I’m looking at it and thinking, well, as marketeers, we have a responsibility. We fund a lot of what happens in technical development, because it’s us that is paying these platforms, wanting to have our presence on there. So it’s just thinking about that. And I was seeing a lot of clients having that frustration with, I think, the pace of optimization and wanting to build something that’s a little bit more long term. That was kind of the two things coming together, my two worlds colliding together into a, well, you’ve got an opinion on it, why don’t you start to write a book? You lecture on these things. Why don’t you get it down to paper? Because there’s also only so many conversations you can have in your lifetime. So, you know, hopefully people will pick this book up and go, I did some interesting things in there, but I’m going to move on to the next level. Like the great books I’ve read over the years, that’s part of my evolution in my thinking. I want to just be a little, one of those little ticks in someone else’s evolution along the way, where they start to maybe question things a little bit differently. And I’ve given my daughters the book and asked them to think about their decisions as consumers when they’re trying to buy stuff online as well. Love that.

And I think you’re so right, like short-termism, it can be such a drug, right, for businesses, particularly big organizations where, you know, people are so desperate to justify their existence. And if they can point towards some data somewhere, you know, it feels rational and it feels lovely. And, you know, they can kind of justify their existence when, as you say, if we lose sight of the basic thing, which is as a business, you’re there to serve someone else, you’re there to serve their need today. But if you think just about that, you’ve got a problem, because really you want to be thinking, I’m here to serve you for as long as you need me to. You know, that could be for years. And if you’ve got short-term focus and your teams are all driven, short-term, short-term, short-term, they sometimes might make a decision, which will benefit the customer and themselves in the short-term, but might damage the long-term relationship. And that, I think, is sometimes how businesses and brands get themselves into difficulty. Anyway, what I was going to say was, let’s shift gear a little bit and dive into this like full on, right? Because I know in your book you go through, which by the way, just to lend my endorsement to it, I think everybody on this who’s listening to this should definitely grab a copy. We’ll give details in a minute of where you can get it. But let’s just go into some of the principles that you outline. I think you go through like eight key principles of customer experience. So I was wondering if you’d be open to outlining those for us. And then perhaps we could dive in and unlock a couple and kind of get into some nitty gritty. Would you be open to that?

A hundred percent. Let’s start with why they principles are not rules or laws. And I’m not necessarily the most linear of characters myself. As I would imagine, many great entrepreneurs, business leaders, designers, brand strategists are as well. So the principles because, and my school reports would tell you this, I didn’t always follow the rules. But it’s something that over time that I’ve just crafted these through. So A, where we look at, consider every detail on how they work together, set, manage and exceed expectations, personalised for the individual, on their terms of putting them in control, minimising effort and stress, considering the identity and emotions, learning and building relationship over time and considering all the senses. And they’ll map against whether it’s accessible, functional or emotional or a series of those. And they just help, I think, give foundational building blocks to start planning your work around. The second half of the book dives into Behavioural Science, which takes it to a slightly different place. But that start point is things that we’ve been working with clients for years on, trying to put a little bit of a structure behind it. But I refuse to call it anything beyond principles because I don’t want to be held to it in the fullness of time. We’re allowed to rethink at some point. But certainly, you know, those are the important things that for me, when you guys are doing brand exercise, I’ve got to live up to your brand exercise, putting them through this lens of these eight principles and really testing my metal against that.

Yeah. I mean, some of them, particularly for the designers who are listening in, will be really obvious. Like that first one, consider every detail and how they work together, right? I guess from a visual perspective, a lot of people are familiar with that, but it goes beyond that, doesn’t it?

Absolutely. So as humans, we’re kind of hardwired to notice differences in environment and things that don’t quite join up. Usually that could be, and I’ll quite often talk about our prehistoric roots where you were a caveman. You’d be looking out for those queues.

You’re like the third guest recently that said that I’m a bit caveman-like. I will accept it, but I’m getting a little nervous. Carry on.

But you, evolutionary, have to look out for risks. So you look for inconsistencies, slight things, and then you go, do I trust this now? And it will be the same in any brand exercise as well, where we need to be consistent across the piece, because otherwise I won’t believe your claim. If in three places you say it, but in one place you contradict it. And that’s when I just think about wording and the things that you’re promising. Before then, I look at what you’re doing visually. So if I think about consistency visually, you say, we are an authentic people first brand, and then you’re using AI generated content on social. I don’t believe your first claim now. So consistency is really important. And I think that’s a tough one for designers, because you like novelty. You like to change things up, freshen things up. So for then someone to go, no, no, we need to be super consistent is tough. And a couple of episodes ago, I can’t remember your guest’s name now off the top of my head. But when they talk about Marlborough and then designing things in green, everything’s got to come back. Consistency is a tough one. It is a tough one because we also like novelty ourselves. And when you’re working on something so much, you forget that it’s 100% of your head space. But for the consumer, it’s that fleeting thing that they see once every four months for three seconds.

That’s a great point and I see it all the time. On a macro scale, you get a new CMO and they want to stamp their authority upon the brand, literally take it in a different direction. And again, going back to that first point, is this how we serve people well? I’m working on a big project at the moment in the US and it’s a brand relaunch and it’s going to market. We’ve got ad TV spots and all sorts going out. And I had to have a really serious conversation with the brand director over there because they asked for, in this particular project, for example, different strap lines to the end of every ad. And my position was, look, we should stick to one really strong because we want to kind of be really clear about what we stand for. And they were like, yeah, but don’t you think consumers will get bored? I was like, literally, someone’s going to see one of