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Voluntary exchange is what made every rich country rich. Humans are inveterate traders, finding a task they are good at and trading what they make with others who are good at a different thing. Our species, homo sapiens, first appeared about 300,000 years ago and along with their bones in the Olorgesailie Basin in southern Kenya, there was evidence of trade in goods made far away.
We are happy to trade with others because both parties benefit. When people have the freedom to choose with whom and for what they trade, needs are met and wealth is created from the surplus of the price of selling something minus its cost. The easiest-to-see evidence for this is the "double thank you." In countries with economic freedom, both the seller and the buyer thank each other as the transaction concludes because both are satisfied with the outcome. When you trade money on a cold day for a hot beverage at Intelligencia Coffee on third street in Austin, Texas, the double thank you reinforces the pleasure both the barista and the customer have at serving and being served.
Successful businesses anticipate the needs of consumers and are ready to meet them when customers arrive. The anticipation of consumers' needs is a tricky business since people have poorly defined preferences over things they have not yet experienced. Think of the failures of New Coke, Google Glass, and Amazon's Fire phone; market research "proved" that these products would have tremendous markets. Making the wrong decisions results in products and services that go unsold which can lead companies to fail.
Even when the products on offer have solid demand, the business need to sell more can generate tension between buyer and seller when both have the freedom to say no. I teach a graduate course called The Science of Extraordinary Customer Experiences where I joke that my religion is Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). The need to sell more right now is moderated by a desire to create a loyal customer with high CLV over many years of buying from the business. Sellers need to push to sell in the short term, but without being so pushy that customers are turned off and refuse to buy, or refuse to return to buy again.
Understanding what a customer needs now, and treating the customer so she or he will return repeatedly, is the foundation for building CLV. New research from my lab (along with my colleagues Gaia Rancati, Immersion co-founder Jorge Barraza, and Kankana Ghosh) shows how businesses can very effectively drive up customer CLV by measuring real-time neurologic Value. As a reminder, our Value Score (previously called Immersion) is the one-second combination of neural signals that captures the value of an experience physiologically and very accurately predicts individual and market outcomes.
Now here's the twist: we did not measure real-time Value for customers.
Gaia is a professor of neuromarketing and is an expert in luxury retail. This project was part of her doctoral research that Jorge and I supervised. Gaia wanted to understand how interactions with sales associates determine why some retail customers spend thousands of dollars while others leave without spending a penny. We wanted to study real customers spending meaningful amounts of money, not college students spending a few bucks in a lab. Gaia connected to two high-end retail clothing stores and convinced the owners to let us run a field experiment in their establishments. But, we could not interrupt customers shopping because this was a real business that needed to make sales to be profitable.
Several large companies using the Immersion Neuroscience platform have shown that training done in-person with other learners in the room consistently produces much higher neurologic Value compared to that done online. High Value increases information recall and results in a more enjoyable experience. My team and I hypothesized, based on these data, that Value might be contagious. So, we ran an experiment in which we measured Value in sales associates while they helped customers shopping at a store that sold men's clothing and at another store selling women's clothing. We wanted to see how accurately sales associate Value would predict which customers would buy.
Real money was on the line. The average spend in this study was $323 and the maximum spent was $2,734. Of course, some customers made no purchases at all.
Here's what we found: Value data from salespeople predicted which customers would make a purchase with 80% accuracy in the women's story and 64% accuracy in the men's store. Moreover, customer spend increased linearly with Value of the salesperson through a not unsurprising method. When Value was high, customers spent more time in the store, and when customers stayed longer, they spent more.
This peer-reviewed research demonstrated that when shopping produces high and sustained neurologic Value, customers not only get items they want, they enjoy the process of shopping and stick around longer to look around and often buy more. These are customers who have high CLV: they get the items they need and are treated to an enjoyable buying experience. There is little reason for them not to stay loyal to a business that provides them with extraordinary service.
This research doesn’t just help us understand customer behavior—it opens the door to practicing better sales.
Whether you're pitching a product, guiding a customer through options, or refining your delivery, Value Measurement gives you real-time feedback on how effective and emotionally engaging your approach truly is. With Immersion's free Value Measurement app, SIX, sales professionals can now rehearse their pitch, test different styles, and see exactly when they’re connecting—and when they’re not. It's like having a neural mirror that shows you the moments that matter most.
So next time you're preparing for a big sale or trying to turn a one-time buyer into a lifelong customer, don’t just guess what works—measure it with the SIX app! And remember, when your pitch lights up the brain, loyalty tends to follow.
To bring this research to life, I recorded a short video explaining how measuring sales associates’ brain activity revealed a surprising predictor of customer behavior: