Qaalfa Dibeehi

There is a real psychological phenomenon called the IKEA Effect.  It describes the notion that there is really is love in our own labour.  When we put effort into building our own things we attach greater value to it.  This phenomenon has investigated by psychologists and behavioural economists but derives its name from the love affair IKEA’s customers apparently have with their self-assembled furniture, even when it’s badly self-assembled.

A Harvard Business Review article by Michael Norton, Daniel Mochon and Daniel Ariely (The IKEA Effect: When Labor Leads to Love, 2011) points out that traditional rational economic thinking would predict that the value attributed to an item that required the consumer to assemble should be lessened since a rational...

Multimodal experience is an experience that involves more than one sense (sight and smell for example). It is getting closer and closer to becoming business as usual. We are not there yet but its incidence is increasing. Indeed, I have previously blogged about multimodal experiences – especially how e-readers are trying to incorporate ambient sound.

My colleague, Kalina Janevska recently wrote a blog on the edible cinema concept. She states that the “Edible Cinema event … attempts to deliberately and in a specific way combine the visual...

For those of you who have read our book “Customer Experience: Future trends and Insights” will know that I spend a bit of time thinking about the coming future of neurologically modulated customer experience which I refer to generally as Neuroexperience”. In the book I define Neuroexperience as “the experience the customer has at the neuro-anatomical, -physical, -chemical and -physiological levels. This experience often occurs subconsciously and is the result of an interaction/s between an organisation and a customer.” Neuroexperience is still a way off from becoming practical for most businesses but it is indeed the future.

So it piqued my interest when I saw report of a study on how junk DNA shapes social behaviour. The basic idea is that if you think of your DNA as a...

I recently wrote a piece on the “man aisle”, a store layout experience that plays on man’s ineptitude with shopping. Well, now I report on an experience at the opposite end of the gender role spectrum. Harrod’s Toy Kingdom will be the first major gender neutral toy store. We normally think of children playing with toys that match generally accepted gender roles, and for the most part it seems that is indeed how children select toys. We also know that boys and girls develop differently: biologically and politically. The issue for many socially aware people is the political difference. It has been argued that political difference is the primary cause in the disparity between men and women’s position in society and there is a long history of progress to even the playing...