Warm coffee, warm hearts
A Q&A with Professor Torsten Ringberg about the hidden influences that can make a hospitality experience special — or awful
I have developed a fondness for W Hotels. This has been an acquired taste. The first time I went to one, in New York City, I loathed it. I felt like the dweeb with a stain on his shirt who somehow got invited to the cool kids’ party in high school.
However, as I have stayed in more of them that feeling has shifted. I still don’t feel like one of the cool kids, but I don’t feel like someone the cool kids are shooting spitballs at, either. It still feels like a clique, and it’s a clique where I don’t fully belong, but at least maybe I am an associate member.
I am not sure why I like the W. I think the dark hallways and check-in area might give it an exotic or retro-cool feel. The up-tempo jazz music probably gives the place a kind of energy. I suspect there is something about the décor that has a positive impact. I can’t tell you exactly, but there is definitely something good happening in my mind when I stay there.
Dr. Torsten Ringberg, Professor of Marketing at Copenhagen Business School, has co-authored a paper in the Annals of Tourism Research entitled “Embodied Cognition Effects on Tourist Behavior.”
I spoke with him about how the physical environment can subconsciously influence our hospitality experiences, and the complexities of implementing insights like this in a real-world environment.
James Forr: Where did the idea for this article come from?
Torsten Ringberg: It came from work we had done earlier on moving up and down, which I did with two colleagues in the US. When people imagine moving up and down, it affects their self-worth. People moving down actually feel less self-worth — and the opposite when moving up. That has implications because the ones moving down are working harder to getting back up. So, for example, they are more dedicated to a GMAT test that we gave them in order to make a better impression.
Also, in another study we did, they were willing to pay more for luxury goods. It is sort of compensatory consumption, in contrast to people who moved up or imagined moving up, like on an elevator or escalator. They were more lackadaisical, more relaxed, and a bit more overconfident. They have higher self-worth so they put less effort into solving tasks and they didn’t need or want to buy luxury goods at a higher price.
My co-author on this article, Assistant Professor Florian Kock, also has worked in tourism for quite a while and has done research on evolutionary biology and how that affects people’s willingness to be tourists and engage with foreigners and so on.
JF: For people not familiar with the term, what is embodied cognition?
TR: It’s based on some core senses like touch, temperature, smell, sound, weight, and so on. Early on, they make an impression on how we experience the world around us and establish some emotional reactions that then are translated into our thinking (i.e. cognition). That’s the reason they’re still very influential. These impressions are the basis of much of the scaffolding that also establishes our cognition later on in life.
It’s not like we only see small effects. There are some real, significant effects that our sensory experiences have on our thinking. When you’re holding a hot cup of coffee versus a cup of iced coffee when evaluating people, you will evaluate them quite differently. If you are in a cold room, you will also tend to feel more lonely because loneliness stems from your upbringing when you were being breastfed and held close by your mom. You felt very comfortable; however, when you were put down in the crib, you felt more lonely and you would also experience a change in temperature, typically.
That still lingers on in our cognition and affects how we react. If we are asked to think about a lonely situation and to estimate the temperature of the room we’re in, we’ll typically give a lower temperature estimate.
JF: It even affects language — something like giving somebody the “cold shoulder,” for example.
TR: Yeah, it is also manifests in metaphors. Metaphors are prevalent in our language and will affect the way we think about ourselves and others.
I should also mention there are two different types of embodied cognition that have a direct impact on the senses — incidental (or embodied) and direct reactions from our senses. Many places use citrus fruit scents to convey freshness and cleanliness. That is what we have come to associate with cleanliness. But there is a secondary reaction to that. We project that sensory experience on other people, such as that we view other people as more morally pure when we smell citrus fruits. This finding is not an intuitive conclusion we get from the direct experience of our senses. It’s an incidental or second-level reaction that impacts our thinking subconsciously.
“If asked to think about a lonely situation, we’ll typically give a lower temperature estimate.”
JF: That sense of moving up and down. What are impacts of that? Does that mean you put the jewelry department in the basement, where people are most likely to spend a lot of money, and the cheap stuff up top?
TR: That’s exactly how you should do it. People who have moved down or merely imagined doing so feel less about themselves are willing to pay more to re-establish their sense of self.
We also have the research showing that, for example, a heavy book will make people think it is important. And it works bi-directionally, which means when you’re told a book is very important and you then hold it in your hand, you will also assign more weight to it.
That could be directly translated into restaurants and other places that serve with dinnerware and utensils. If they are heavier, people will most likely evaluate the food to be of a higher quality and maybe even extend that sensation to the service personnel.
Some of this has yet to be researched, but some of this actually has been researched. In our recent paper we refer to many interesting research findings on how our senses affect us subconsciously, but also introduce a lot of new ideas of what could be investigated.
The thing is a lot of this stuff is tacit, it’s highly subconscious and you don’t notice it when you experience it.
JF: You have a table in your paper that lists a number of different applications or things to investigate for the tourism industry. What were a few of those that in your mind stuck out as being particularly interesting?
TR: We haven’t really prioritized this table. We listed it as we found examples from the literature and also as we, ourselves, came up with new and interesting potential research.
There has been quite a strong research stream, especially in Journal of Consumer Psychology in the last 10–15 years. [But] it hasn’t really hit at the management level or the managerial suites. Even in the Annals of Tourism Research, which is the leading international tourism journal, we couldn’t find a single article about this and how they would potentially apply this. The same with Journal of Retailing and some other high-ranking journals.
Tourist resorts and other places, I’m sure by experience, will have found some of these things by intuition. They might not even be able to explain why they do what they do but they will have succeeded or they will copy other places that are successful and it seems to be because of a certain type of design or temperature or dinnerware and so on. Yet, such causal connections typically have been highly intuitive. Our research helps those managers to strategically use embodied cognition to improve the tourist experience at their resorts.
There is a lot of interesting stuff going on in this field and there are many more areas to be investigated. It’s a very under-investigated area in tourism.
“A lot of this stuff is highly subconscious and you don’t notice it when you experience it.”
JF: Why do you think practitioners in the tourism industry have been relatively slow to investigate this kind of thing in any systematic way?
TR: I think it’s because they are very pragmatic. They might try out various stuff. For example, they might make the interior lighter or dimmer, the floor softer or harder, create an ambient smell of flowers or citrus, but such decisions are typically based on intuition rather than on cool experimental facts, and thus risk backfiring.
For example, the width of the desk between the service personnel and the consumer during check-in affects how guests perceive the friendliness of the personnel. In this case, it seems quite intuitive, but [managers] will probably think more about the design and signage and will have some architect or designer come in and say, ‘This looks good.’
JF: One final question. Let’s say someone was building a hotel or a casino or any kind of tourist spot and they said ‘Okay, Torsten, we want you to design this to be the most optimal consumer experience it could possibly be.’ What are some of the things you would do?
TR: It depends on the purpose of course, if you want to be perceived as a high end or low end. You have to differentiate between the types of signals you are sending.
What still needs to be investigated is that when you are a visitor to a hotel you are impressed with a lot of different senses at the same time. You have the light, the smell, the sound, the sensation of the carpet on the floor, and so on. There are many, many senses engaged at the same time and we still don’t understand fully which of the senses will override the other senses, which will be stronger in a given situation. If two senses are contradicting each other, what will happen then? Will they cancel each other out or will they both be salient in some way?
That is what we are trying to do right now, to combine two or three senses, which is what happens in natural situations. Of course, you can say if utensils and dinnerware are heavier, you are likely to feel the food and service is of higher quality; but it’s also shown that if the waiter (and more so the waitress) touched you briefly on the shoulder, without you recalling it, you will feel better about the service and tip more (but it has to be a female waiter). Yet, what if the dinnerware is lighter? Will a light touch by the waiter compensate for that?
So I can’t give you a direct 1-to-1 thing to do. When people consume sweet food they provide a higher rating of the service personnel. So it might be a good idea to offer sweets as guests arrive and leave. But it should be healthy to avoid counterargument related to people’s diets.
JF: That is still an interesting answer because the ambiguity sheds light on some of the unanswered questions.
James Forr is Head of Insights at Olson Zaltman
