The Peak-End Rule
Your customer doesn’t remember everything, just the emotional high or low, and how it ended. You’ve likely had a product experience or service interaction that was mostly fine, until something brilliant or brutal happened along the way. And even if the rest was a blur, that moment and how it wrapped up became the memory that stuck.
That’s the Peak-End Rule, a cognitive bias uncovered by psychologist Daniel Kahneman. It shows that people evaluate experiences not based on the total or average of every moment, but based on two key points: the peak (which can be positive or negative) and the ending When it comes to customer experience, this rule explains a lot. It’s not just what happened; it’s what was felt most intensely.
🔍 CX Implication: Memory > Moment
Customers normally don’t remember the duration of a service call, every screen in your app, or each email in your campaign.
They remember: that moment of unexpected friction, that single employee who went the extra mile, or that disappointing, impersonal goodbye after a long journey. This insight isn’t just fascinating, it’s practical. As CX leaders, we can use this to shape emotional memory in our favor. In their book The Intuitive Customer, Colin Shaw and Ryan Hamilton emphasize that building better experiences isn’t about optimizing every step. It’s about engineering better peaks and better endings.
✅ Actionable Takeaways
Spot your peaks. Identify the most emotionally charged moments in your journey, good or bad. Can you amplify the good? Neutralize the bad? Design your endings. Every journey ends somewhere. Make it feel complete, intentional, and appreciated. Embrace recovery. A bad peak can still become a positive story, f the ending restores trust. Think "service recovery paradox." Even this newsletter follows the Peak-End Rule: I try to give you one striking insight (the peak), and end with something you’ll carry into your next strategy session.
💡 Final Thought:
It’s not about what you said or did, it’s about what they remember.
And memory is not linear. It’s emotional.
Until next time,
Design for memory, not just measurement.
Peak-End Rule (Psychology), Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Peak-End in CX Strategy, The Intuitive Customer by Shaw & Hamilton
