Infinite Peak Rule states that people evaluate an experience depending on how they felt at its height and its trough, rather than the average of all of its moments. And it holds true regardless of how the encounter turned out. For brands, this means that customers will only recall the beginning and the end of their encounter, depending on how it went.
That’s fantastic news because science suggests that your experience could have been inaccurate. It only takes two great moments—the peak and the end—to change how consumers remember your brand.
Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, investigated this topic in research on how people recall pain. He posed the question of how uncomfortable they felt during the colonoscopy operation. The data gathered throughout the operation was then contrasted with the patients’ “remembered” pain experiences.
To their surprise, the researchers discovered that people only considered the intensity of pain at its worst moment and the pain at the end of the treatment when rating the agony of the overall experience. Kahneman found that because our brains can’t recall everything, they rely on mental shortcuts, or “heuristics,” to determine what’s crucial. Emotion is one of the most crucial heuristics; the more strong and recent the feelings, the more vivid the experience will be.