Rob Alvarez
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Your Customers Don’t Remember What You Think They Do | Episode 460

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Episode Summary

Rob breaks down the peak-end rule, the finding from Daniel Kahneman and Donald Redelmeier’s 1996 study that people remember an experience by its most intense moment and its ending, not its average. He walks through how cruise lines engineer both moments with nightly raffle dinners, a captain’s dinner placed near the end of the trip, and a deliberately overinvested farewell, mapping each to Core Drives 1, 5, and 7 from the Octalysis Framework. Listeners learn why the remembering self, not the experiencing self, drives repeat purchases, how to cap sessions while desire is still climbing, and where the ethical line sits between honest peak design and covering up a bad experience.

About the Host

Rob Alvarez is Head of Engagement Strategy, Europe at The Octalysis Group (TOG), a leading gamification and behavioral design consultancy. A globally recognized gamification strategist and TEDx speaker, he founded and hosts Professor Game, the #1 gamification podcast, and has interviewed hundreds of global experts. He designs evidence-based engagement systems that drive motivation, loyalty, and results, and teaches LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® and gamification at top institutions including IE Business School, EFMD, and EBS University across Europe, the Americas, and Asia.

Key Takeaways

  • In Kahneman and Redelmeier’s 1996 study, deliberately extending a painful colonoscopy so it ended on milder discomfort increased total pain, yet those patients remembered the procedure as less bad and returned for follow-ups at higher rates.
  • The remembering self, not the experiencing self, makes the decision to come back, and it is a terrible statistician: it keeps two data points, the peak and the ending, and discards the average entirely.
  • Cruise lines run the peak-end rule as a business model: nightly raffle dinners built on Core Drive 7 (Unpredictability and Curiosity) and Core Drive 5 (Social Influence and Relatedness) rewrite a mediocre day with a manufactured high.
  • The captain’s dinner adds Core Drive 1 (Epic Meaning and Calling) near the end of the trip, and disembarkation is deliberately overinvested because cruises live off travelers who rebook every year, not first-timers.
  • A concrete design move: cap the session while desire is still climbing, so the last memory is “I wanted more” instead of “I was starting to get bored.”
  • The ethical line: peak-end design is honest when the peak and the ending tell the truth about the experience, and manipulative when those two moments are used to cover up an experience that was genuinely terrible.

Topics Covered

Mentioned in This Episode

Free Resources and Get in Touch

Looking forward to reading or hearing from you, Rob Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

The peak-end rule and a painful paradox

Rob Alvarez (0:00): There is a rule called the peak-end rule, and it proves that you’re optimizing the wrong thing for your users. And then there’s a paradox that proves it. Group of researchers took a long medical procedure, very painful, very discomfortable. They made it longer, so the total discomfort was broader and the patients remembered it better and came back more. Everyone and their mother is pouring budget into the average, smoothing out every single little edge. Average barely touches memory and the users churn out anyway. Rob Alvarez (0:35): There’s this landmark study done by Daniel Kahneman. It’s a study behind the colonoscopy paradox, which is the medical procedure I was describing before. And it’s not a fluke, it’s how memory really works. I’ll walk you through it in a second. I’m Rob. I’m the head of engagement strategy in Europe at the Octalysis Group, and I’m also the host and founder at Professor Game. And this kind of design work is what I do for my job every single day. I’ll show you how and why the experience you deliver and the experience people remember are two completely separate things. The plan is we’ll look at the principle, a real machine built around this principle, and then a few of the diagnostic questions you can ask yourself to apply this right away. Rob Alvarez (1:18): Hey, and if you want to get better at reading this thing yourself, all you have to do is go and click on the link below, grab my free guide, Core Drives in the Wild. You’ll get one email per day. That’s all. Click there, register, you’ll get it.

Inside Kahneman and Redelmeier’s 1996 study

Rob Alvarez (1:34): Now let’s get back to the study back in nineteen ninety-six by Kahneman and Redelmeier. They had patients rate their pain every sixty seconds during a very uncomfortable and painful procedure as colonoscopies used to be. The memory of how bad it was tracked two separate moments. The worst point and the final one. The total was not really a part of what was left over in memory. Rob Alvarez (2:05): For some of the patients during the experiments, their procedure was intentionally, deliberately extended, made longer, just so that it ended on a milder note where there was pain and discomfort, but it was not a peak discomfort, but rather something a lot more mild. The result was that even though the total, if you if you could add, you know, it was a number you could just add on top of the other, there would be more total discomfort. But the ending was slightly less uncomfortable. What happened with that? People were a lot more willing to come back for the follow-ups when the procedure was extended.

Experiencing self versus remembering self

Rob Alvarez (2:55): So Kahneman’s frame is that there are two selves, so to speak, of a person. One is the experiencing self, that self that experiences everything that is happening in the moment. And there’s another self called that he called the remembering self. It’s that one who remembers the past experience. But guess what? The one that makes decisions about things like going back for the follow-up procedure. Is not the experiencing self. It is the remembering self. And our remembering selves are terrible statisticians. They don’t understand about averages or any of that statistic nonsense. All it remembers very, very clearly is the peak, whether of pain or pleasure, and the very last moment, also known as the ending. Rob Alvarez (3:50): And look, this sounds all very fancy talking about medical procedures and all that. But most of you listening right here are not doctors, not conducting medical procedures, probably not even working in direct health procedures, anyways. So let me bring you to an example of something I experienced personally myself.

Rob’s reluctant cruise vacation

Rob Alvarez (4:07): You might or might not know that I am not exactly a fan of very hectic travel, you know, going to 20 places in 10 days. That is definitely not my kind of thing. So when I tell you that I decided to go on a cruise, you might start questioning my life decisions. But beyond that single part, I want to tell you about my experience on a cruise. Because as I said, cruise and its model itself is definitely not my kind of thing. And I went to one with my wife. Rob Alvarez (4:39): But when I look back on it, and I sort of put my very logical self facing that remembering self that I have as well, the remembering self says, well, actually, it was not that bad. It doesn’t really remember all those hectic, all the bunch of people moving. One place per day and not really experiencing, which is what I like, experiencing a place, not totally, because you’d need to spend months, maybe even years to really experience fully a place. But you know, I like to spend a few days, at least, or maybe even a week or so, to really be able to get to know a bit more of the nuance of a place. And that’s the opposite of of a of a cruise. That remembering self says: you know what, it wasn’t that bad at all. Rob Alvarez (5:23): And there’s a very simple explanation to that. The cruise experience is designed around the two moments that I’ve been talking about since the episode started, the peak-end rule. What are some of the things that they do to be able to, in that kind of experience, really implement and get the best out of this bias that we have as humans?

How cruises manufacture nightly peaks

Rob Alvarez (5:47): One of them is the nightly peak. At the end of every single day, they have this dinner where most of the people will go and they have raffles, they have prizes, anticipation, a crowd, winners. Of course, a lot of Core Drive 7, Unpredictability and Curiosity. And even there’s Core Drive 5, Social Influence and Relatedness, energy. There’s all the people, everybody’s excited, somebody’s winning. You know, you feel that energy right there. Even in normal mediocre day gets rewritten by this end of the day situation. It has what you could call a manufactured high. Rob Alvarez (6:24): In the same line, you have the dinner with a captain kind of moment. And this is just my suspicion. I’ve never worked with cruises either directly myself. But I’m guessing that they put it either immediately before you leave, so the night before you actually leave the ship, or somewhere along those lines, just so that it’s closer to the ending to follow that peak-end rule, or you know, for sure, it’s at the end of the day because it’s dinner, right? And it it gives you a little bit of Core Drive 1, Epic Meaning and Calling, just because you’re having dinner with the authority, the captain has all these perks, you have all these feelings going around because there’s this very special dinner. You feel like a chosen one just for being on that dinner. Although I’m guessing every single person gets that experience or something similar. Maybe it also depends on what’s the tier that you’re paying. But a lot of people got this experience as well. They’re manufacturing, of course, Core Drive 5, Social Influence and Relatedness, once again, because there’s other people there and you’re relating to this other human being, you you’re you’re they’re fabricating this experience where it gives you a peak towards the end of the day, or probably even towards the end of the trip itself. They’re giving you this social peak, very close to the end of the whole experience.

Overinvesting in the ending on purpose

Rob Alvarez (7:38): And finally, there’s one that might seem a lot more subtle. Normally, when you have an experience like this one, you know, whether it be directly travel or vacations in general, think about the end of vacations. Usually it’s, I’m sad because vacations are ending. It’s picking up all your luggage, carrying it all the way, it’s paying the bill. It’s all of these experiences, which I don’t know if you remember any of those fondly, but I certainly can’t associate paying the bill, carrying the luggage, and that kind of stuff with something positive in and of itself, unless you’re going to something special after that, which happens at the start of the trip. But according to the peak-end rule, it’s not so important at the start as it is towards the end. So what can you do with a situation like that one? Let me allow you to sit with that for a second. Rob Alvarez (8:29): In cruise ships, if you’ve been, you will remember this once I say it. And if you haven’t been, once you hear it, you will think initially it’s like, well, they’re overinvesting in this kind of thing. And yes, they are. And it is intentional because at this point, they are overinvesting in the ending. It’s not the part where, you know, it’s over, just get off the ship. It’s the part that becomes the final word in your memory for the whole trip. And guess what? Cruises don’t live off of new travelers like I was during that cruise ship. They live off of people who come back ideally every single year. And how do you get people to come back? They remember, the remembering self has to say, wow, that was an amazing experience. Why would I do anything different than a cruise ship next year or on my next travel? Rob Alvarez (9:19): So to sum it up, TLDR, I think they call it when it’s written, I had a mixed experience. There were good things, not so good things, and that is kind of blurry in the overall memory, unless I really focus and try to do that. But my remembering self is saying, you know what? It was actually pretty good. You should be going back at some point. And even though I am a very I try to sell myself to myself as a very rational being. I understand that that rule now is being applied to myself because of the how the system itself was designed.

Cap the session while it’s climbing

Rob Alvarez (9:55): So here’s what that looks like when we are designing experiences ourselves as gamification and behavioral designers. What we can do is actually cap the experience while the desire and the experience is right at a high. It’s maybe even still climbing. It could go even higher. You cut the session right there. So people have that feeling that they were capped and they wanted more rather than, yeah, you know, I’m starting to get bored. I’d rather go out. If that is the last thing you remember, that is how you will be telling yourself the experience actually was. Rob Alvarez (10:31): Ending on a peak can be a design choice that you make for your product. It can help people more accurately remember the value of something that they experienced, whether it’s a health procedure, which, you know, pleasant or unpleasant, it probably is something you needed, and that helped you get your health better or at least reassure you that you are healthy enough to just move on or ignore that possible diagnosis you had, right? So it might help you more accurately remember this. And I’m not saying colonoscopies are conducted that way. That was used as a study just to understand it better. Nowadays, colonoscopies have other things like sedation and all that stuff. But you can also manufacture a better memory than it actually happened.

The ethical line of designed memories

Rob Alvarez (11:26): So the honest version is when the peak and the ending are telling the truth about the experience. The problem is that usually we are designing for the average and smoothing, as I said before, all the edges and not considering an honest version of how to end in a peak that helps people more accurately remember what their experience actually was. It’s more questionable when, of course, the experience was terrible, and you just use these two elements to cover up for all the crap that the experience actually was. You’re using the same tool, but you’re introducing an ethical line here, which I always suggest people or ask people to really draw. Are you trying to lie to people? Are you trying to trick people into believing something that didn’t happen? Or are you trying to more accurately represent the good, the cool stuff of your experience, or the not so bad in the case of the colonoscopy as it was?

Diagnostics: did you design your ending?

Rob Alvarez (12:11): So think about the experience you have designed in an app, in a product, in an experience, in your employees experience, I don’t know, whatever that looks like. Did you design a peak or is it just happening? Did you design for an ending? What is the final moment that people will remember it for? Or did it just happen? Most experiences tend up to have an accidental ending. Don’t fall to that trap. Actually, design for how you want to be remembered. Because people do not remember your average. They’ll remember the best moment or the worst one and the final one. Nail those two moments and your experience will be better remembered by your players, by your users, your employees, whomever you are working with. Rob Alvarez (12:59): And remember, if you want to get an improved read on these kinds of situations where the Core Drives are being applied, their the motivation is being applied in real settings, in corporate settings. Get the Core Drives in the Wild from the link below in the description. There I will be analyzing past episodes where the Core Drives are well or not so well exemplified. Analyze them, give you my own take as a consultant, and suggest how you can use it in the future. And at least for now and for today, it is time to say that it’s game over. End of transcription

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