“Your guests may forget the things you do and say but they will never forget the way you make them feel.”
In my last article on the great satisfaction myth (for the article click here), I argued that satisfaction is misleading as a key measure of success. This is because satisfaction focuses on value created by rational factors, whereas human behaviour is driven by emotion. What matters is not what your guests think but how you make them feel because we are physiologically wired to repeat what makes us feel good.
In this this article, I’m going to explain what an emotion is, how this differs from a feeling and how you can create the conditions for your guests to feel more positive emotions that lead to loyalty and brand advocacy.
What is an emotion?
An emotion is your body’s response to threats and opportunities, and is built into our survival instincts as a species. It is experienced as a physical reaction to something that we perceive, and is caused by the release of chemicals and hormones that are designed to protect us or lead us to pleasure.
For example, when we are afraid, our hearts race, our skin turns pale, our mouths become dry, our muscles contract and we move away from the object or situation triggering this negative response.
Emotions can be experienced in bursts or over a longer period as background moods. The important thing to remember is that emotions are largely non-conscious, similar across individuals, and lead to movement or action. Emotions underpin human behaviour.
How are emotions different from feelings?
Feelings are believed to have evolved later in our evolutionary history and are a conscious experience of an emotion. This is what allows us to store memories and gives us the ability to plan for the future.
Feelings are created when the brain processes emotional signals, checks them against previous experiences and labels them. For example, imagine you walk into a shop to return an item of clothing and see two sales assistants. One smiles at you and the other one doesn’t. Your natural inclination is to approach the smiling sales assistant (emotion) because they make you feel more confident that they like you and will refund your money.
The important thing to remember now is that feelings are subjective and can vary from one individual to the next. You can’t observe a feeling in someone else because it happens mentally, but you can observe an emotion because it manifests itself physically.
So, now that you understand the importance of emotions and feelings, let’s look at how you can create the conditions to trigger more positive emotions and feelings in your guests.
The triggers
Rather than focus on triggering certain feelings, I always try to focus on triggering positive emotions because these are more similar from person to person. Triggering a certain feeling is much more difficult, and requires a close understanding of an individual’s development and cultural conditioning.
Emotions are mostly triggered by external stimuli that are fairly high or low in positive or negative terms. This is because we are constantly scanning our environment for change as a source of threat or reward – contrast is important. We need to remove threats and make people feel safe, as well as create sensory pleasures.
Interestingly, some emotions are also purely stimulated internally in our mental maps. For example, when we see someone crying, we feel empathy for their sadness and re-create their suffering to a certain extent internally. In this context, positive emotions can be triggered by human observation, empathy, and by aligning the experience in some way that adds meaning to an individual’s life.
Creating the conditions for positive emotions – 5 key ideas
Using a restaurant as our canvas for orchestrating an experience, here are 5 ideas for creating the conditions for positive emotions and feelings.
1. Heighten sensory pleasures by dimming the lighting – sight is a distancing sense and other senses are intensified when this is shut off. Think of singers who close their eyes when they sing with intensified emotion. When we’re eating food, we want to see it of course because appearance affects taste, but intensifying other senses is key to a memorable gastronomic experience.
2. Clearly define different areas in your restaurant – make them walk into different experience zones. Remember, we perceive and create memories through contrast.
3. Use curved edges rather than straight lines and right angles. Curved lines are comforting whereas sharp lines remind us of danger. It is critical to avoid any kind of stress response in your guests as this can in fact change our perception of taste. The Journal of Neuroscience shared a fascinating study in December 2006 that found mood can change your perception of taste, and high anxiety scores correlated with blunted taste sensations and significantly higher thresholds for bitter and salt taste.
4. Make sure everyone smiles even when answering phones and responding to emails. Smiling releases the neurotransmitters Serotonin (key in regulating mood) and endorphins (body’s natural pain killer) and, when we smile, we actually talk in a warmer tone. Next time you’re complaining on the phone, try doing it with and without a smile on your face and notice how your tone changes.
5. Scatter sensory pleasures throughout their experience. An appetite stimulating scent as you enter the restaurant, warm scented towels to refresh at the start of a meal, a complimentary amuse bouche to tantalize taste buds, cold palette cleaners in between hot courses, a cushioned relaxing area to enjoy after dinner drinks and pay the bill in relaxed comfort. . . Remember, it’s not the size or intensity but the frequency of little sensory pleasures that matters.
And while you don’t have to be Heston to bring this to life in your restaurant, it is worth pondering the fact that the chef who really gets this is enjoying the accolade of not one or two but three Michelin stars and is considered to be one of the best restaurateurs in the world . . .
About Michelle (Hawkins) Collins
Michelle is the Head of Happiness at The Flying Dodo. She uses her knowledge of the brain, consumer psychology and marketing to turn what was once seen as a subject for the self-help shelves into a field of expertise taking pride of place in the business section of the bookshop. She sees happiness as the greatest source of competitive advantage in our experience economy by using it to create richer, stronger and more memorable customer and employee experiences.
Michelle has over a decade of experience in marketing, market research and consumer psychology. She has worked across industries and sectors including consulting, FMCG, healthcare and hospitality. Prior to launching the Flying Dodo, she spent 4 years working in luxury hotels and was latterly Head of Sales and Marketing for a 5* hotel in Tanzania.
For more information click here