Memory, the new Eldorado     

Today, in an era where attracting attention is worth its weight in gold, one thing is certain: the goal of any brand is to be remembered, its advertising spot, the taste, the noise, the sensation when using its products or the fluidity of its service. Any experience with the brand, physical or digital, is a way for it to anchor itself a little more in the memory of the collective and to build customer loyalty. According to Forbes Insight and Treasure Data, 74% of customers are likely to buy a product or service primarily based on their experiences with the brand.   

But anchoring yourself in the memory of customers bombarded with messages, images, videos and noises all day long is not an easy thing – it is estimated that more than 5000 exposures to brands and advertisements are put in place every day. So, when everyone often struggles to remember the previous night's restaurant menu, how can you create experiences that are easily remembered?   

To answer this challenge, we must first understand how memory works. Indeed, it is the starting point, and the common point, of any memorable experience. To put it - very - simply, INSERM explains that there are 5 memory systems:  

• For the short term: working memory, 
• For the long term: semantic memory and episodic memory,
• For unconscious automatisms: procedural memory, 
• For the different sensory modalities: perceptual memory.  

Memorization occurs when the connections between neurons within a memory system change. A memory appears when these neurons reactivate together, like a network that lights up. 

Design to be remembered 

INSERM also tells us that emotions have a significant impact on human memory capacities. This is because they lead to a one-time improvement in attention, involving several phenomena within the brain: a consolidation of neural connections, better retention of information and better retrieval of memories. The more intense the emotion felt, the greater its impact on the brain and it is therefore easier to remember an emotionally strong experience than a neutral one.   

Once we understand a little better the relationship between emotions and memory, we can ask ourselves how to proceed so that the products and services developed by brands provoke strong emotions. Emotional design is a methodology that fits perfectly into traditional methods of designing and improving products and services (e.g. design thinking) and allows us to take into consideration the context, the feeling at the time, the emotions of the user and to infuse this throughout the design process. In this way, we can build the paths that will fully meet the needs of a user, provoke appropriate emotions and, ultimately, an experience that he or she will remember.  

An example to better understand: it would not be optimal to design a handbag purchase journey, a catering service and a hospitalization journey in the same way... while all 3 can be done by one and the same person in the same day! Each solution must be designed to take into account the person's situation and emotional state and provide an appropriate response - whether it is through fluid and rapid care, the friendliness of the people on the phone or the ultra-personalized support they received.     

For us, this is the challenge of the moment. Let's remember that humans are irrational beings and that, according to Daniel Kahneman, a neuroscientist and psychologist who revolutionized behavioral economics, more than 95% of their decisions are made unconsciously.  It is therefore essential to put human emotions back at the heart of the design of experiences. In this context, at Deloitte Digital, we place emotional design at the heart of our practices, with the ambition to highlight the real impact of this approach.  

Multiple emotions, a methodology 

With the aim of emotionally touching customers at key moments in their journey, creating memorable experiences and building long-term loyalty, we have worked on a framework that allows us to natively integrate, at the heart of our design process, a reflection on the emotions felt by the users of a product or service, at each stage of our design projects. We have therefore adapted our tools, activities and deliverables so that this new dimension takes a central place in the reflection, throughout the process.   

To make this approach more tangible, let's take a concrete use case with the first phase of a Design approach. The goal is to understand the current state of the personae's experience and therefore to be able to map the emotions they experience at each moment of the journey. This will allow us to identify the key moments when we can act and put in place actions to modify what is felt by the user.   

To do this, we have increased our methodology with tools adapted to this objective. During a user research phase and during qualitative interviews, some of the questions asked will aim to put into words what customers feel with the help of Robert Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions.