The Decision Space: Episode 3 - Designing How People Decide

FULL TRANSCRIPT HANS PETERSEN Welcome to the third episode of The Decision Space. We've already talked about how space has stopped being a neutral background. We've also discussed why somebody needs to govern the entire process of creating that space. This time, we're going further—beyond how a space looks and into what it feels like to be inside that space and make decisions there. For that, we have a guest: Kevin Vermillion, a human performance architect. He's going to help us explore how people make decisions within the kinds of spaces we're talking about. Gergő, Kevin, thanks for being here. KEVIN VERMILLION Thank you for having me. GERGŐ NIDERMAYER Thank you. HANS Gergő, you build these spaces. When did how they look stop being enough? GERGŐ That's a tricky question. You can create a space that we might consider beautiful, but if it doesn't move the customer, it's a failure. And it can be a very large and very expensive failure. A space that one person considers beautiful may be completely unappealing to somebody else. If that means losing half of your potential customers, it can become extremely expensive for the brand. That's why we started examining customer behaviour. We began looking at how customer behaviour could influence the design of the space itself and how we could gather more meaningful data from that behaviour. We looked at what customers like, where they move, how they move, what sounds they respond to and what smells they prefer. But eventually, we reached a limit. We realised that behaviour alone couldn't give us all the answers we needed. That was the point where we needed to look at something deeper—and where Kevin and his team came in. HANS Kevin, this is your world. Why do people make such different decisions in the same space? KEVIN One thing that needs to be clear from the beginning is that personality is not the same as mood, and it's not the same as behaviour. Mood and behaviour can flow from personality, but personality itself is much more stable. It's a consistent pattern in the way people absorb information, make decisions and perform when it matters most. You have some people who walk into a retail environment and make decisions extremely quickly. They move fast. Then you have people at the other end of the spectrum who are much slower and more deliberate. They want time to think about their decision. If you design a space exclusively for one of those people, you may alienate the other. HANS So personality has a significant influence on this. I'm actually surprised to hear that word in this context. KEVIN It has an enormous effect. Personality directly influences how we make decisions, and it remains relatively consistent over time. So if you're designing a space around someone's personality, you're getting much closer to understanding how that person actually makes decisions—and in our context, how they make purchasing decisions. We've known this for quite some time in human performance. The data has existed for decades. It has been studied in high-stakes environments such as boardrooms and among first responders. It has also been studied extensively in sport. One useful example of how an environment can either support or undermine performance came during COVID. Athletes were accustomed to performing repeatedly in the same stadiums and on the same courts. Then suddenly, during COVID, those stadiums were empty. The physical parameters of the space hadn't really changed. But some athletes performed exceptionally well in that environment while others performed significantly worse. A lot of that was connected to personality. Some people perform extremely well without an audience. Others feed off the crowd and gain enormous energy and support from it. So we need to understand how the entire environment—not simply the physical architecture—affects the way people make decisions and ultimately perform. One of the things I find interesting about what Gergő is doing is bringing that scientific rigour into commercial environments. We can begin designing spaces around decision-making profiles so that the environment genuinely supports the target groups the brand wants to reach. HANS So a space can measurably help people with particular personality profiles make decisions? KEVIN Absolutely. If you have a defined target group, you can facilitate their decision-making process. You can focus on them and make their experience as effective as possible. If you understand how they make decisions and then design the environment to support that process, you can engage them much more effectively. You're making the experience more relevant to them. And ultimately, that can increase the likelihood of a purchase. HANS Let's put the two sides together. Gergő, you govern the space. Kevin, you model the person and the personalities within that space. What does that combination make possible that wasn't possible before? GERGŐ That's the key. The space is no longer designed simply for beauty. It can be designed around personality—around the people who will actually be making decisions inside it. That's something new. We don't see many others applying this approach in the premium segment, and I think it can create a significant advantage for brands that want to sell their products in a different and more precise way. KEVIN From the science side, we've always focused heavily on data and precision. But combining these disciplines adds another layer of depth that wasn't there before. Historically, much of the analysis has been retrospective. We model behaviour. We analyse how people move through a store. We look at what they have already done. This approach allows a brand to become much more prospective. That's important both for attracting new buyers and for creating better experiences for existing customers. HANS Let me challenge that slightly. Brands have been creating customer personas for years, and those personas have formed the basis of their marketing communications. How is this fundamentally different? KEVIN The general concept has certainly existed for a long time. The question is whether it has actually translated all the way into the physical implementation. Getting from point A to point B has been difficult for many companies. And there is another important difference. We're not simply talking about theoretical personas. We're going deeper into actual personality profiles and, beyond that, into the mechanisms people use to make decisions. So it's really a question of depth. HANS So rather than creating an imagined individual to market towards, you're basing decisions on actual data and information that goes beyond someone's assumptions. KEVIN Exactly. It's much more data-focused and much more rigorous. The industry still tends to think in terms of a generic customer or a relatively broad ideal-customer profile. But the generic customer doesn't really exist. When you design towards a particular personality or decision-making profile, you have a much clearer target. That can be extremely effective for a brand. You can also begin to understand which environmental conditions can facilitate the decision-making process for that particular profile. And I want to emphasise the word facilitate. We're not talking about manipulating the customer. We're asking: what allows this particular customer to make their purchasing decision more naturally and effectively? That's the objective. HANS Can you give me an example of what that mechanism might look like in a specific situation? KEVIN Think about the way different personalities enter the same store. We've all heard stories about somebody who is extremely wealthy but still drives a twenty-year-old Toyota. Now imagine that person walking into a high-end fashion or footwear store. The environment might feature fine Italian leather, marble surfaces and exceptional service. The salespeople may be impeccably dressed. Objectively, it could be an outstanding premium environment. But somebody with a personality that is more socially or family oriented and relatively uninterested in status may feel completely uncomfortable there. The very elements intended to communicate professionalism, exclusivity and brand identity could alienate that particular customer. On the other hand, somebody whose personality is strongly status-oriented may walk into exactly the same environment and immediately feel at home. Even if buying the product represents a financial stretch for them, they may place enormous value on what that product communicates about their identity. The same space can therefore create completely different responses in different people. HANS I can relate to that. Gergő, you now have all of this scientific and data-driven background to guide decisions. How do you make it real in the physical environment? GERGŐ That was the challenge we needed to solve. As I mentioned earlier, we had reached a limit in how far we could go using behavioural observations alone. With this data and methodology, we can focus much more precisely on the customer as a person—how they behave, how they make decisions and what kind of environment supports them. We can then modify or adapt the space around those characteristics. And this goes much further than simply what somebody sees. It's what they smell. It's what they hear in the background. It's what they touch. It's how they feel when they step into the store. And ultimately, it's the experience they take with them when they leave. KEVIN I think that's an important point. Brands often create a brand identity and a customer persona without having enough depth in their understanding of the actual personality profile of their target group. They're trying to pursue the persona, but they don't necessarily understand it at the level required. That can lead to significant mistakes that actually alienate the very target group and core customer base they're trying to attract. I'm sure you've seen that. GERGŐ Unfortunately, it's quite common. You can have a great brand and an excellent product but still not understand precisely who is walking into the store. You may know what they want to buy because you have data from e-commerce and previous purchases. But that doesn't necessarily tell you what they are looking for from the physical environment. Where do they want to sit? What kind of chair feels right to them? Which materials are familiar and comfortable? When they sit down, do they prefer touching a cold surface or a warm one? How do they respond to warm or cool lighting? Those details can influence how comfortable somebody feels inside the environment. If the experience is fundamentally wrong for them, they may not buy. More importantly, they may not come back. And that's critical. You want customers to return and buy from the brand again and again. KEVIN What's been fascinating for me in bringing these two areas together is seeing just how deeply a brand needs to understand its customers in order to serve them properly. You need to understand their desires and what they actually want. Often, customers themselves can't even articulate those things. It sounds extremely data-focused—and of course data is important. But at the heart of this is something much more human. It's about developing a deeper understanding of people. HANS It seems like you're reaching a level of detail that I would never previously have considered open for discussion. Warm light versus cool light, for example. As a marketer, I might simply have relied on intuition: this is what I like. But that assumes the customer is like me. The people buying my product may actually be very different in ways I haven't even considered. GERGŐ Exactly. And that's really just the surface. We could sit here for hours discussing examples. Imagine a global brand with stores in Germany and in the Middle East. The people entering those stores can have very different expectations and decision-making profiles. That means you don't necessarily need the same colours. You don't necessarily need the same scents, sounds or music. But if you don't understand who the person is and how they make decisions, you can't respond intelligently to those differences. HANS I wish I'd had people like you guiding some of my decisions when I was more active in marketing. We've gone from thinking of space as a neutral background to understanding it as an active part of the decision-making process. And now we're grounding that process in data and actual personality profiles rather than simply imagined personas. It seems you're creating a new category of service for brands, marketers and owners who could otherwise make significant mistakes by not looking deeply enough at the people they're designing for. It's been fascinating hearing what you both have to say. I look forward to continuing the conversation. KEVIN Thank you very much for having me. GERGŐ Thank you. HANS Thanks.