Thomas from Ariyh - 🎓 Welcome to Ariyh + Bonus tip

Welcome onboard, evidence-based marketer!

What to expect

You’ll get 3min practical marketing tips every Tuesday (latest research) and Thursday (best research from the last 10 years).

Each tip is based on a research paper published in a highly reputable scientific journal. That means it has been peer-reviewed by other marketing scientists (i.e. picked apart and challenged to verify the findings).

Ariyh covers the best 1% marketing research papers of 10,000+ published each year.

You can read all previous tips here. For example:

• Use “Handwritten” fonts to increase sales

• People love products with rituals

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Your bonus tip

Below is your first tip. It’s a classic, and a very powerful behavioral science principle. But I find it’s still, to this date, not well-known enough by marketers. And it’s a great ending to your sign-up experience 😉

Peak-end rule: customers judge and remember an experience mostly by its peak and its ending

Impacted metrics: Customer satisfaction | Customer lifetime value
Channels: Customer experience | UX | Customer journey | Website | Retail store
For: Both B2C and B2B
Tip type: Existing research (1993 - 2008)

📈 Recommendation

Concentrate on creating two positively intense moments in the customer journey. One at the start or during the experience, and one at the end.

🎓 Effects

• Increased customer satisfaction and customer lifetime value or repeat purchases.

• Customers rate and remember experiences or products that use the peak-end rule better than those that don’t. Even when the overall value of the former is lower.

• Can be applied to both services (e.g. a hotel stay) and most product-related experiences (e.g. a website signup, the purchase and unpacking of a physical product).

• Also applies, in reverse, to pain (e.g. a large payment, asking to fill a form). In this case, you may want to dilute the end peak by adding a pleasurable (or less painful) step to the experience, rather than ending it with that. Try to also keep ‘peak pain’ as low as possible, even if that means extending it longer.

🧠 Why this works

• We evaluate experiences based on how we remember them. Our memory does not store everything. Each time we recall it, it reconstructs the experience based on a few cues it has stored (which, by the way, can be easily influenced). Peak-end rule research found that those two peaks are the main cues we use to reconstruct a memory.

• Several biases come into play to form this rule. From the fact that we prefer simplicity, to how strong emotions are memorable, to the recency bias (i.e. we give more importance to something that happened more recently).

✋ Limitations

• Does not work when there isn’t a clear beginning and end of the experience. However, you can usually extrapolate parts of the overall experience to which this can be applied (e.g. first time using a product).

🏢 Companies using this

• Several companies use the peak-end rule. For example, Hilton Doubletree has a peak at the start of the experience by offering chocolate chip cookies to guests checking in. In other luxury hotels, the peak moment is often when guests first enter their room.

• Music festivals usually keep the most awaited musicians for the final act, to create an end peak. Similarly, Apple creates an end peak with a high quality product unpacking experience.

• Most companies, especially outside the experience industry, still don’t apply the peak-end rule, missing opportunities and diluting their offering.

⚡ Steps to implement

• Review your customer journey. Is there an opportunity to create a ‘Wow’ moment for customers? If not, create one. This could also mean concentrating a few positive moments rather than spacing them out throughout the experience.

• Pay special attention to the end of your experience, and make sure it ends on a high. If it doesn’t, you can even try small things to correct it: a fun and personal goodbye, a small parting gift, or simply a big, sincere smile.

📖 Research

Do, A. M., Rupert, A. V., & Wolford, G. (2008). Evaluations of pleasurable experiences: The peak-end rule. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 15(1), 96-98.

[Link to research paper]

Kahneman, D., Fredrickson, B. L., Schreiber, C. A., & Redelmeier, D. A. (1993). When more pain is preferred to less: Adding a better end. Psychological science, 4(6), 401-405.

[Link to research paper]

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