I fight to keep the products that make me happy even when they aren’t strictly necessary. Ground coffee over instant. Lego, plastic bricks for the nostalgic kid in me and an escape from the anxiety of modern life. Champagne on my birthday, even though wine makes more economic sense. It is never really about the coffee, the bubbles or the bricks. It is about how they make me feel.
When money is tight, you’d expect decisions to get more rational. They don’t. They get more emotional. As everyone knows, I love a course. After finishing the IDF’s Design for Thought and Emotion with a distinction (which, yes, made me feel much better about recommending it), I’ve been thinking about why customers don’t fall in love with products we ‘know’ they need, and why logic alone never quite answers “how do we get more leads”.
The brain under financial pressure chases the dopamine hit. A single bad experience sends a client elsewhere. The product didn’t stop working. It stopped feeling good. Gallup puts 70% of purchasing decisions as emotionally driven. When times are hard, that number rises.
Feeling Good Beats Functionality When the Budget Gets Cut.
When clients are looking at where to cut budget or spend money, they don’t work through a logical audit of functionality. They cut the things that frustrated them. The product that was always slightly more painful to use than it should have been. The one that doesn’t have the sparkling feature everyone is talking about. Even if they still need what it does, the friction and the bad feeling tips the decision. The thing that felt good, that made them feel capable and supported, survives the cull. Sometimes it is the only thing that does.
A 2023 University of Basel study published in Frontiers in Psychology tested 281 people on two versions of the same app, identical in functionality but different in aesthetics. The visually appealing version scored higher on perceived usability. And here is the kicker: participants using the better-looking app actually performed better too, answering more questions correctly. This is the Aesthetic-Usability Effect. Beauty doesn’t just feel easier. It makes people do better. And when something looks cobbled together, they blame you immediately.
It applies to everything a client touches: your proposal, your portal, your invoices, your onboarding. When the experience is smooth, friendly, and enjoyable, clients extend goodwill and put in more effort. Beauty buys forgiveness. Pleasurable products buy loyalty. Both keep you off the cutting list.
The Mary Poppins Problem: Important Isn't Enough Without the Spoonful of Sugar
Are we adding the spoonful of sugar? This one is for the business. Important things can feel like they should sell themselves. They don’t. If adopting a new feature feels like homework, people won’t do it. How are you making the right behaviour feel good?
Does this feel right immediately? First impressions set an emotional tone that colours everything that follows. Clients decide within seconds whether they feel in good hands. Plan for that moment. It doesn’t happen by accident.
Did it feel good when it went wrong? Your client didn’t arrive in a vacuum. They brought their day with them. A frustrating experience on a bad day gets remembered as worse than it was. A warm, responsive one gets remembered as better. Design for the emotional memory, not just the resolution.
How do I feel about this afterwards? Does choosing you make them look good? Do they feel like a valued partner or a reference number? This is what separates clients who stay from clients who leave the moment something better appears.
Design the Experience, Not Just the Product
Gamification gets a bad reputation. Badges, points, streaks. But the real principle is simpler: make using your product feel good. Small moments of satisfaction. Progress that feels visible. Friction replaced with something that feels intuitive. A product people enjoy using gets used more, used better, and talked about. One that merely functions gets tolerated until something more enjoyable comes along.
The Pied Piper Problem: Don't Blame the Rats
When clients follow a competitor, it is easy to start seeing them as the rats. They were seduced. They didn’t understand the value. They fell for the shiny thing. But that is the Pied Piper problem in reverse. You are blaming the rats for following the music.
Simpler and harder than that. Your competitor is playing a tune that feels better. The logic doesn’t stack up. Choosing them just feels good. “Does this make me look good?” is often as powerful as “is this actually better?” Adult buying behaviour is deeply tribal, and being seen with the right supplier still moves decisions in ways nobody admits out loud. When clients leave, the question is not what was wrong with them. It is: what tune were you playing?
We Forgot Why We First Fell in Love: Don't Become the First Ex-Wife
Think about the first date energy of a great product or service: the excitement, the attention, the feeling that this was made for you. Clients fall in love with what you offer in those early moments. But relationships drift. You become familiar. Comfortable. Taken for granted. And while you’re busy delivering, a newer, shinier alternative is turning on the charm. Your client is feeling that first date feeling all over again, just not with you.
You became the long-term partner they stopped noticing. And they left for someone who made them feel something.
What to Actually Do
Map emotional low points, not just process failures.
Where does a client feel anything less than valued? That’s often not the same place the process breaks down.
Design for when things go wrong.
How you respond to a problem is often more emotionally significant than the problem itself. It can be planned, scripted, and trained. It should be.
Audit everything a client touches.
The proposal. The welcome email. The invoice. The out-of-office. Each one either adds to or quietly drains the emotional account you hold with that client. Most of these get created once and never revisited.
Stop measuring satisfaction. Start measuring connection.
Satisfied clients leave for a better deal. Connected clients don’t.
The honest truth is that emotion is hard to prioritise when you can’t easily put a number on it. It doesn’t show up cleanly in a dashboard. That’s exactly why it’s the gap most businesses leave open. And why the ones who take it seriously keep winning.
The best product doesn’t always win. The lowest price rarely holds loyalty. What keeps clients, and loses them, is how they feel every time they interact with you.
That feeling is designed. Either by you, with intention, or by nobody in particular, which is the same as leaving the door open for someone who cares more.
Your competitors are betting you’re too busy to notice.
Further Reading
- Design for Thought and Emotion — Interaction Design Foundation
- The Aesthetic-Usability Effect — Nielsen Norman Group
- Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things — Don Norman, Nielsen Norman Group
- Celebrity Service 2nd Edition — Geoff Ramm
- Customer Brand Preference and Decisions — Gallup
- Recognizing and Correcting Positive Bias: The Salient Victim Effect — Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre
- Smartphone App Aesthetics Influence Users’ Experience and Performance — Frontiers in Psychology, University of Basel (2023)
