Ep.72 BUILDING BETTER BUYING EXPERIENCES BY USING BRAIN SCIENCE with Tara Haase Hieminga, Elevated Shopper Experience, Global Lead, Mondelez International

ABOUT TARA HAASE HIEMINGA:

LINKEDIN PROFILE:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/tara-haase-hieminga-48124621/

TARA'S BIO:

Tara Haase Hieminga is the Elevated Shopper Experience Global Lead at Mondelez International. With more than 12 years at Mondelez he has previously held roles such as Senior Manager Shopper Marketing & In-Store Merchandising, Sr. Manager Design & Digital Engagement. Prior to Mondelez, Tara was at Kraft Food Group as the Design Strategy Leader and before that, she worked for Mars as the Brand Manager, Candy and In-Store Marketing Manager for Snackfoods.

SHOW INTRO:

Welcome to the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast.

EPISODE 72… and my conversation with Tara Haase Hieminga. 

On the podacast our dynamic dialogues based on our acronym DATA - design, architecture, technology, and the arts crosses over disciplines but maintains a common thread of people who are passionate about the world we live in and human’s influence on it, the ways we craft the built environment to maximize human experience, increasing our understanding of human behavior and searching for the New Possible.    

The NXTLVL Experience Design podcast is presented by VMSD Magazine part of the Smartwork Media family of brands.

VMSD brings us, in the brand experience world, the International Retail Design Conference. The IRDC is one of the best retail design conferences that there is bringing together the world of retailers, brands and experience place makers every year for two days of engaging conversations and pushing the discourse forward on what makes retailing relevant. 

You will find the archive of the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast on VMSD.com.

Thanks also goes to Shop Association the only global retail trade association dedicated to elevating the in-store experience. 

SHOP Association represents companies and affiliates from 25 countries and brings value to their members through research, networking, education, events and awards. Check then out on SHOPAssociation.org

Tara Haase Hiemanga who is the Global Lead for Elevated Shopper Experiences at Mondelez.

She is using an understanding of neuroscience to enhance customer experiences across a number of the Mondelez brands. What brands are those, well there is a pretty big list but let me just say a few of my favorites – OREO, Toblerone, Cadbury, Wheat Thins and I could go on…

We’ll get to all of that in a moment but first though, a few thoughts…

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Back around 2008, 9 and 10 my wife was studying interpersonal neurobiology with Dr. Dan Siegel. 

I used to come downstairs and listen to her and all the videos she was watching and various conversations she was having and I was often saying ‘wow that really replies to the work that I'm doing in trying to create retail stores.’

As I listened it became clearer and clearer to me that I could perhaps rely on the lessons of understanding neuroscience as being the core driver to customer experience rather than simply thinking of it in terms of psychology, demographics and culture.

What fascinated me then and still continues today is the idea that – there was something beyond simple psychology that we would be able to use to design better stores something that would relate to almost all humans in terms of how they understood environments specifically how they would look through product assortments, identify key item presentations, understand graphics, and how color, pattern and texture would all come together to either hinder or help decision making in the shopping aisle.

Interestingly, back in the day, it took me a little while to get into architecture. I'd had a great time in junior college but my grades weren't great so I ended up enrolling in a Bachelor of Science in psychology which I was fascinated in anyway because I wanted to understand human dynamics but, I also had a sense that there was something deeply rooted and not just how buildings looked from the design point of view and but how they made people feel from an embodied / sensory point of view. 

And so, when I finally got into architecture a lot of my thinking about design was about how these places that we were creating would have qualities about them that would make people feel a certain way.

I sometimes used to say that I didn't care whether you loved it or hated it (of course I hoped you loved it) but I wanted to make sure that you felt something as you were experiencing some place. 

And that later in my retail design career that you were satisfied with the experiences as well as the things that you bought in the store.

In 2012 I did a presentation at global shop that was ostensibly about emotions and how we had to begin to understand that creating stores was about building emotional relationships and long term connections and then the awareness of how empathy played into this equation.

This single presentation was a turning point in my career because someone came up to me at the end of it and said “…that idea should be a book.”

And so, taking that as a sign…I was on my way to immersing myself for the next couple of years in writing “Retail (r)Evolution: why creating right brain stores will shape the future of shopping in the digitally driven world. “

In the book I really dug into the nature of shopping as a cultural phenomena; it's power across the ages to tie together ideas and commerce 

the growth of shopping places around the world from the intersections of silk trade routes to the mega malls of North America and I also dug into brain science. 

In fact over a third of the book deals with understanding functional areas of the brain and how if we we're able to appreciate more how our gift in perception through our body was directly tied to our emotional connections and long term memory could be used - that all shoppers and retailers would be better off.

I tried to explain it this way: imagine you're in your car - what I'd like you to do is write down 5 things that make the engine of your car run now if you're actually in your car while listening to this, do not start to write down these five things but hold them in your head as an idea what are the five things that make your car engine run? OK got 5 of them?

Now, I want you to think about your brain and think of five things that make you run - through your engine - in other words your brain. 

The strange thing is and I've done this at multiple presentations around the world people are more apt to be able to describe 5 things that make the engine of their car run where they might spend 2 hours a day in rather than being able to identify more than two things that make themselves run ( the functional areas of their brain) that they spend 24hrs a day in.

I also put forward the following proposition:

- if we understood that all of our behaviors, thoughts and feelings are run by our brain-body connection, how is it possible that we could be designing stores and not have any clue about the very thing that is so influential in making decisions in the shopping aisle and our willingness to maintain relationships with the brands we love?

So, it became a little bit of a career mission to bring the understanding of neuroscience to the retail design masses hoping that they would understand the power of the brain-body and design and creating effective selling spaces.

Now, the other influence here was the emergence of digital technologies and how that was fundamentally changing the way our brains were being wired. 

With the idea that the more you use a functional area of your brain the more you maintain its wiring between neurons and the less used something is the more though the brain goes on a wonderful topiary garden creating extravaganza trimming away neural pathways that are not being used. 

This whole subject is referred to as “synaptic pruning” and fits together neatly with an idea around “neuroplasticity” - how your brain changes over time in relation to the things that you're exposed to in the patterns of behavior you engage in.

So my premise then was: - if you are increasingly not using certain areas of your brain related to the exercise of empathy in face to face embodied interactions with other people like we continually do by communicating through our digital devices, what does that mean for the pathways for empathy in our brains and how we communicate with others?

If stores were about empathic engagement, we might have a significant challenge ahead of us. 

In other words, if we are communicating less and less in embodied, face-to-face ways, what happens to the neural pathways built for empathic connection if we are using them less? 

Does synaptic pruning play a role here eventually diminishing our ability to engage in empathic extension?

This became particularly interesting when you began to look at an entire cohort of emerging customers whose lives were very much directed by their interaction through social media that works and the digital devices they held in their hands. 

That is the subject of a bigger and equally interesting conversation which I'll save for another podcast but for now let’s continue to focus on trying to understand what actually motivates people in the shopping aisle there have been fantastic studies that I came across the work of Baba Shiv and how decision making was made in the shopping aisle in relation to the potential for customers cognitive overload how they decided to choose one thing or another or the work of Sheena Iyengar who did a famous study of jams and the idea that a huge selection did not infact increase more purchases and satisfaction in the products chosen.

There are now a heft of studies that are available that continue to reinforce the fact that people's behavior in the shopping aisle is not fully conscious. Much of it happens below the conscious awareness radar.

We are driven by our emotions and our collective history of hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution that gear our brains, regardless of culture, religious or sexual orientation political affiliation or where you live in the world, that we all to some degree are reacting from the same baseline of brain activity in the brain’s functional areas that we all have.

Over the past 10 years there have been a number of organizations that have emerged focusing on the relationship between neuroscience and the built environment.

The ANFA - the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture would be one of them.

Another would be the Neuromarketing Science and Business Association whose conferences around the world bring together neuroscientists, designers, architects, retailers and brands to talk about the influence that neuroscience could play in creating more effective shopping places.

So, I am a huge advocate for trying to understand how we work and the neural mechanisms that influence our behavior beyond our psychology. 

The whole idea here is that if we knew a little bit more about how your brain worked, you might likely not do some of the things you do as an architect or designer creating retail or brand experience places thinking it matters when in fact it's completely off of the awareness radar and probably has little influence on how people react while in stores.

And so we come now to my interview with Tara Haase Hiemanga who is the Global Lead for Elevated Shopper Experiences at Mondelez.

So… when I say Mondelez you may not know the parent brand but I'm quite sure that you know some, if not all, of these brands and products that might be in your diet every single week.

The Mondelez brands include: Cadbury chocolate and Dairy Milk, Chips Ahoy cookies, Clorets, Halls, the famous Oreo cookie, Philadelphia cream cheese, Ritz crackers, Tang apparently the drink that the astronauts used to have back in the day, Wheat Thins and Toblerone.

Do you know some of those brands? 

Yeah I thought you probably did. 

Last spring I was attending the SHOP Marketplace event and onto the stage comes Tara Haase Hieminga and a consultant from the company Sellcheck.

They proceeded to talk about how they were using neuroscience to enhance shopper experiences across their assortment of products. 

Now if you've ever walked down the snack aisle at your local grocery store, I am quite sure that you are familiar with the sea of merchandise that exists there.

Hundreds of brands all selling within the same category and the question is how does a brand stand out or how do you as a consumer, if you don't already know your brand that you want to buy, decide to buy anything?

If you follow the neuroscience, it can be quite a challenge for the brain to unpack most of what's in that shopping aisle. 

On the other hand, if you consider neuroscience you can begin to understand how people make decisions about what they want to buy and be able to do things in terms of your packaging, your product positioning, shelf graphics, the language you use on your packaging to enhance the likelihood that customers will give you deeper consideration and maybe buy more than they anticipated.

And that's exactly what Tara, Sellcheck and Mondelez is doing across their portfolio brands. They have begun to see the incredible impact of implementing neuroscience principles to the design of their packaging, point of purchase presentations and shelf displays so that the customers that they have, or ones they hope to acquire, will be attracted to their product, understand the messaging and end up with more than one bag of snacks in their shopping cart.

I wish that Tara and I would have had hours to discuss the intricacies of neuroscience and shopping behavior and how it relates to the design of products and in store presentations.

This is a subject that I believe all of us should have intimate knowledge.

Since I have never met a retailer who wanted to have a bad experience for their customers, I would suggest that implementing a deep understanding of our innate neurobiological hardware is critical.

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ABOUT DAVID KEPRON:

LinkedIn Profile: linkedin.com/in/david-kepron-9a1582b

Websites:  https://www.davidkepron.com    (personal website)

vmsd.com/taxonomy/term/8645  (Blog)

Email: david.kepron@NXTLVLexperiencedesign.com

Twitter: DavidKepron

Personal Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidkepron/

NXTLVL Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nxtlvl_experience_design/

Bio:

David Kepron is a multifaceted creative professional with a deep curiosity to understand ‘why’, ‘what’s now’ and ‘what’s next’. He brings together his background as an architect, artist, educator, author, podcast host and builder to the making of meaningful and empathically-focused, community-centric customer connections at brand experience places around the globe. 

David is a former VP - Global Design Strategies at Marriott International. While at Marriott, his focus was on the creation of compelling customer experiences within Marriott’s “Premium Distinctive” segment which included: Westin, Renaissance, Le Meridien, Autograph Collection, Tribute Portfolio, Design Hotels and Gaylord hotels. 

In 2020 Kepron founded NXTLVL Experience Design, a strategy and design consultancy, where he combines his multidisciplinary approach to the creation of relevant brand engagements with his passion for social and cultural anthropology, neuroscience and emerging digital technologies. 

As a frequently requested international speaker at corporate events and international conferences focusing on CX, digital transformation, retail, hospitality, emerging technology, David shares his expertise on subjects ranging from consumer behaviors and trends, brain science and buying behavior, store design and visual merchandising, hotel design and strategy as well as creativity and innovation. In his talks, David shares visionary ideas on how brand strategy, brain science and emerging technologies are changing guest expectations about relationships they want to have with brands and how companies can remain relevant in a digitally enabled marketplace. 

David currently shares his experience and insight on various industry boards including: VMSD magazine’s Editorial Advisory Board, the Interactive Customer Experience Association, Sign Research Foundation’s Program Committee as well as the Center For Retail Transformation at George Mason University.

He has held teaching positions at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology (F.I.T.), the Department of Architecture & Interior Design of Drexel University in Philadelphia, the Laboratory Institute of Merchandising (L.I.M.) in New York, the International Academy of Merchandising and Design in Montreal and he served as the Director of the Visual Merchandising Department at LaSalle International Fashion School (L.I.F.S.) in Singapore.  

In 2014 Kepron published his first book titled: “Retail (r)Evolution: Why Creating Right-Brain Stores Will Shape the Future of Shopping in a Digitally Driven World” and he is currently working on his second book to be published soon. David also writes a popular blog called “Brain Food” which is published monthly on vmsd.com. 

The NXTLVL Experience Design podcast is presented by VMSD magazine and Smartwork Media. It is hosted and executive produced by David Kepron. Our original music and audio production is by Kano Sound. 

The content of this podcast is copywrite to David Kepron and NXTLVL Experience Design. Any publication or rebroadcast of the content is prohibited without the expressed written consent of David Kepron and NXTLVL Experience Design.

Make sure to tune in for more NXTLVL “Dialogues on DATA: Design Architecture Technology and the Arts” wherever you find your favorite podcasts and make sure to visit vmsd.com and look for the tab for the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast there too.