People generally find it easy to distinguish between pleasure and pain with, one assumes, most preferring the former. A good, albeit obvious, rule of thumb in business is to ensure that customers and clients enjoy dealing with you. What might be less obvious is that two specific features significantly influence our perception of how pleasurable or painful an experience really is. For example, imagine that you have just had a rather sore medical examination and are immediately afterwards asked how painful it was, and how much you are looking forward to your next check-up. More cheerily, imagine you have just got back from holiday and again, are asked how much you enjoyed yourself, and whether you would return there.
Your answers will be primarily influenced by two things. Firstly the peak moment of pain (in the case of the check-up) or pleasure (in the case of the holiday) you felt and secondly the final moment of pain or pleasure. A phenomenon known as the peak-end effect. Surprisingly, your feelings at other times of the experience will hardly matter at all and your overall assessment will almost completely disregard how long the experience lasted. Behavioural scientists describe this as duration neglect.
Memories of our experiences are etched with extremity and recency but not necessarily with duration, so they can often be imperfect guides for evaluation. Regardless of how imperfect peak-end and duration neglect effects may be, they clearly have an influence in terms of both how we feel about past experiences and decisions we make in the future.
So if you want to have fabulous memories of holidays, then you might be advised to plan one amazing experience during your time away and travel back in style. Surprisingly you should worry less about how long you go away for, preferring instead to take shorter more frequent breaks.
Businesses wishing to persuade customers and clients to recall experiences more favourably and to come back for more should focus particular attention on the final stages of customer interactions. This means making sure customers and clients experience the high point of their experience with you towards the end and then are given a nice send off. I'm not suggesting that this is an excuse to worry less about how long they had to wait in the first place but it might help to deal with exchanges that didn't get off to the best of starts.
Steve Martin is co-author of Yes! 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasion. Visit http://influenceatwork.co.uk; Twitter @scienceofyes
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