Making a customer happy

Lars E Olson: describes how positive emotions lead to: purchase decisions, loyalty and well—being. When we feel positive about the customer experience, it is easier for us to make the choice of purchase, further we feel loyal to the brand or product and stay loyal to it. Finally, we experience higher well-being.   

Olson presents as the determinants of subjective wellbeing:

·         45% consist of personal characteristics (personality, genes)

·         45% how we spend our time (activities, behaviour, everyday life, goal process)

·         10% social & economic factors (gender, age, cohabiting. children, income, employment, education)

In this perspective, it would be more useful to focus on understanding the customer’s personality and time-spending activities than social and economic factors, which are often more in focus when analysing target groups.

People are generally good at forecasting future emotions on their activities. But they are less accurate at predicting the intensity and duration of their future emotional reactions. (Wilson & Gilbert, 2003)

People seem to exaggerate the intensity if emotions over time. The term impact bias describes how people overestimate the impact of future events on their emotional reactions. (Wilson & Gilbert, 2003)

According to professor Friman, customer satisfaction is experienced over short time. Quality, however, is acquired over long time.

Short term: customer satisfaction depends on the meeting of expectations. If customer’s expectations are met they feel satisfied. High expectations lead often to higher satisfaction. Lower expectations lead to lower satisfaction. The intensity of customer’s emotions are more intense in short-term and gradually fade and sometimes even alter in time.

Long-term:  Lars E Olson explains the term hedonic adaptation, adjusting to circumstances meaning that the intensity of the emotions will become lower overtime. This means that in order to keep the intensity of the emotions on the customer experience we need to change and adapt that experience over time.

In a restaurant:  We need to come up with new menus, drinks and entertainment in order to keep the customer interested. If we just do the same thing over and over, customers will get bored and go to another place. This is possibly one of the reasons why many restaurants don’t survive in the extremely tough competition. It’s said for instance that an average restaurant in the Helsinki city centre has a life expectancy of 2 years. After that: adapt or go extinct.  

Can we make customers happy? The experience recommendation: if you want to be happier, buy life experiences instead of material items. But also experiential products, i.e. products between life experiences and material products provide similar levels of wellbeing compared to life experiences and more well-being than material products. (Guevarra & Howell, 2015)

Hedonic consumption are said to improve happiness. This means purchases that focus on enjoyment, fun and pleasure. Hedonic purchases provide different levels of well-being depending on whether the customer has purchased material items or life experiences.  

My final favourite words of wisdom: Those who believe that happiness can’t be bought don’t know where to shop.