Creating an ‘outstanding’ customer experience is a ‘waste of time’: Monheit on biases in the auto sector
According to Dan Monheit, behavioural economics specialist and founder of indie creative agency Hardhat, automotive marketers can distill their sales strategies to somewhat of a simple algorithm by honing in on a couple of consumer behavioural biases.
Kicking off Mumbrella’s Automotive Marketing Summit this morning, Monheit brought his expertise in behavioural science to the room, breaking down the perceived need for a perfect customer experience in an industry that asks consumers to hand over tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars in exchange for the brand promise of a vehicle that resonates with their values and desires.
Dan Monheit today spoke at Mumbrella’s 2022 Automotive Marketing Summit
“Creating an outstanding end-to-end customer experience is a complete waste of time,” Monheit explained, offering that as humans, we don’t really want great experiences, but great memories.
Core to this bias is the fact that, “not all parts of an experience are created equal when it comes to creating memories”. In fact, Monheit said that the creation of memory is driven but what is known as the ‘peak end rule’.
Here, a consumer’s recollection of a particular experience will be determined not by the sum of how they felt throughout, but by one or two peaks during the experience, combined with how they felt when it ended.
An examples Monheit offered was the experience of attending a theme park – a place where fond memories are often created. Despite our positive associations with theme parks, the reality is that we often spend more than 90% of our time their lining up, eating over priced food, and coping with the sugar highs of our own or other’s children.
This insight, according to Monheit, renders efforts to ensure that every moment and every touchpoint of the customer journey is perfect, effectively, is a waste of time. In reality, ensuring there are two ’15/10′ moments in the experience and a nice touch at the end of the purchase (and of course, no negative peaks), consumers will walk away with a positive memory of a great experience.
Monheit also put forward the concept of the effort bias – that perceptions of the value of a product of service are largely determined by the perceived effort that has gone into it.
“If we think more effort has gone into producing something we can’t help but believe that the thing that comes out the other side is more valuable,” he said.
In the mind of a consumer, effort is romanticised and praised, and often has a perceived correlation to price, such as in the case of artisan goods, or products and services that requires a long manual process.
Of course, effort does not always equate to better quality or value, but human biases tell us that if something is more difficult to create or achieve, it is more desirable. Take for example, the arduous process of applying to become a member of an exclusive club.
For Monheit, the key takeaway from this biases for automotive marketers is to “let [consumers] see you sweat”. Give them an insight, or an impression that the product or service you are offering was difficult to deliver, and the consumer will appreciate the end result all the more.
I don’t know what planet Dan Monheit is living on but he has no idea. Currently our household is looking for a new car. We have found: some sales (men and woman) don’t even acknowledge you even when you enter the showroom, in which case we walk out. In one place on Parramatta road we looked at SUV’s, the two guys in the office kept chatting to themselves while looking at their mobile phones, laughing, they did not acknowledge us at all, when we got back into our car (outside their office) to drive away their brains suddenly realised they had lost a potential sale. The end-to-end experience is vital. Recently one of my friends went to buy a Mercedes sports (a present to himself for his birthday), at the Mercedes showroom they looked down their nose at him as if he was a homeless person, he went next door to Audi and spent $80,000 buying a new car. If we had been treated better at the start both sales would have happened. Forget the algorithms Dan, people want a good customer experience from the first to the last.
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I’m not a frequent commenter and don’t like to openly use this forum to disagree with people. However in this case Brendon I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood what Dan is saying. Firstly he agrees with you that none of the experience should be bad. He is simply saying that it doesn’t have to be perfect / outstanding the whole way through and that there are parts of the process that a potential consumer values more and so more effort should be placed there. To your point the first interaction may very well be a key one. I point all this out because I think its vital that don’t allow misunderstanding and personal anecdotes (that in this case actually support the presenters) to be used as some kind of proof that proven research is lacking in foundation and should be scoffed at.
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100% my experience as well – given 12 month lead times on a Toyota Prado delivery salespeople seem to think their only job is to get customers to form an orderly queue!
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Thanks Alex. Couldn’t have said it better.
The central theme of the presentation was the we should be looking for ways to create outstanding memories, not outstanding experiences.
The research suggests that the way to do this is with a 15/10 moment somewhere towards the end with no negative peaks along the way. What Brendon has described would definitely count as a negative peak and absolutely impacts the memory of the experience (as the post suggests).
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