In today’s competitive landscape, how do you know you’re not just meeting but exceeding customer expectations? How do you capture the true value you’re delivering at any moment in time–to customers, an audience, or guests? How do you know an experience is resonating as it unfolds or whether it will have a lasting impact?
Too often, businesses settle for mediocrity–offering average products and services that compete on razor-thin margins. Consider Subway: despite being the largest food chain in the U.S. with over 20,000 locations, Subway has profit margins of just 7-8%, and nearly a quarter of its stores have closed since 2016 due to unprofitability. Each remaining store struggles to capture even the smallest fraction of market share. Compare that to Chik-fil-A. With 14,000 U.S. locations and plans to add 900 more by 2027, Chick-fil-A enjoys profit margins around 30%—and that’s even with closing all stores on Sundays. The difference? Chick-fil-A delivers not just good food but an outstanding customer experience, keeping customers loyal and willing to wait in long lines. When was the last time you saw more than a couple of people in line at Subway?
That's the choice: Aim for good, or strive for excellence? Offer a commodity, or provide a valuable, memorable experience? Customers who are just OK with what you sell, or raving fans who tell their friends about you?
Experiences create value. Welcome to the Experience Economy, a concept introduced by authors and experiential experts, Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore. In this economy, the measurement of experience value is paramount. Without measuring the value people get out of an experience, designers cannot consistently create extraordinary experiences. Frustrated customers are fickle; delighted customers are not.
So, what should you measure? Sales perhaps, but this only indicates need, not delight—and worse, it’s a lagging metric that doesn’t predict future success. What about the infamous Net Promoter Score (NPS)? Research indicates that only 15% of customers respond to NPS surveys, and these tend to be the happiest, making the data skewed and more of a vanity metric. More importantly, NPS doesn’t reveal what’s specifically going right or wrong in the customer experience. To truly drive business success, you need to measure what people actually value during the experience, not just what the happiest customers recall or say they might do later.
The best measure of success in the Experience Economy is Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). CLV measures the total revenue a customer is expected to generate over their relationship with your business. For instance, a customer of Starbucks who spends $10 a week on your coffee for 25 years contributes significantly ($13K) to CLV. Increasing CLV is a marker of customer loyalty, and signals that customers love the experience you are creating.
The key question is: How do you increase CLV? Traditional advice might suggest market research—convene focus groups, ask people what they "like." You pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into surveys and studies, yet CLV remains stagnant. Why? People don't consciously know what truly delights them.
Fortunately, there’s a way to uncover what truly resonates with and delights people, offering the insights needed to drive CLV growth. At Immersion Neuroscience, we’ve pioneered a cutting-edge method to measure what people genuinely value in real-time. This innovation is rooted in research by our founders, who identified a brain network that captures the unconscious value of experiences, and uniquely mapped its connection to the heart. Building on this pivotal groundwork, Immersion Neuroscience has taken this science out of the lab, moving beyond superficial "likes" and "recommendations" to unbiased insights that predict future action with over 85% accuracy.
We call this network "Immersion" because, when it is activated, it fully immerses us in an experience. More importantly, when the brain deems an experience valuable, it becomes memorable, influential, and likely to inspire action. Immersion is objective, continuous, and passive–making it consistent and comparable across individuals because it is rooted in neural responses. And here’s the best part—our technologists at Immersion Neuroscience have made Value Measurement effortless.
We’ve created a platform that lets anyone measure what people value in real-time, every place people interact with your company–online, on-site, even after midnight.
With two decades of scientific research behind us, Immersion's founders have mapped the body’s signals to the brain's valuation network. By applying cloud-based algorithms to data from any smartwatch, fitness tracker, or smart ring, we are enabling real-time measurement of true value—the kind of value that predicts purchases, boosts CLV, enhances employee satisfaction, optimizes the ROI of corporate events, identifies hit songs, and uncovers your brand’s most raving fans.
Measuring what people value continuously, passively, and effortlessly means you’ll know exactly what delights your customers and where to make improvements—driving up CLV in the process. And the best part? All it takes is a QR code and a free app.
To truly succeed, every organization must understand what their customers value. It’s the only reliable way to create higher value and achieve meaningful business outcomes. Or, you could keep hoping things work out—or rely on those "super fun" surveys.
SIX by Immersion Neuroscience is all you need for Value Measurement. It’s a choice–not a comparison. Download the app and get a free Value Score for any piece of content or experience!