Creating a "Vanilla Yogurt" Customer Experience

Contributor Kristin Guthrie is Honeywell Aerospace’s former Vice President of Customer Experience.  She will be presenting on customer experience culture at the upcoming Call Center Week Online.  Register for the complimentary event here.  Connect with Kristin on LinkedIn here.

To Expand Profits, Focus on Emotions

Most traditional business studies track customer satisfaction in black or white: either your audience likes your service, or it doesn’t.

But as new ways of collecting data are developed, it is becoming clear that the gray area of emotion plays a significant role in customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Touch an Emotional Nerve

Using emotive projection testing to measure responses, a team of food researchers looked at what emotional effects eating flavored yogurts had on participant moods.

While people said they ”liked” a wide variety of yogurts, test data overwhelmingly showed that eating vanilla yogurt actually made them feel happy.

“Most strikingly, vanilla yogurt elicited a strong positive emotional response,” said Dr. Jozina Mojet, lead author of the study. “This supports previous evidence that a subtle vanilla scent in places like hospital waiting rooms can reduce aggression. It also encourages relationships among patients and between patients and staff.”

Potential Airline Implication

People respond emotionally and positively to vanilla. It changes their outlook. Whatever experience they’re having, vanilla enhances their enjoyment.

This data suggests In-flight food choices may be able to impact perception of the flight crew and improve passenger mood.  Try adding a scent of vanilla to the areas in which passengers congregate. Or put vanilla yogurt on the in-flight menu.

Honeywell’s Take on the Research

The research technique may be just as important as the actual finding.

The ability to tap into evoked emotions – and move beyond the thumbs-up/thumbs-down assessment of customer interest – can be invaluable to marketing and customer experience leaders.   As Dr. Mojet underscored, “The findings suggest that the new method could be an effective way to gather information about a product before taking it to market.”

Imagine describing a new product concept or even a proposed process change to a focus group and then measuring their emotional response to a series of unrelated photographs. Did concept A generate a happier emotion than concept B?

What are your thoughts? Would this be more insightful than measuring explicit preference between product A versus product B?