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David Kepron, vice president, global design strategies at Marriott International, and author of “Retail (r)evolution, Why Creating Right-Brained Stores Will Shape the Future of Shopping in a Digitally Driven World,” set up the meeting’s theme, “BrainStorm,” by discussing how our brain affects our behavior, as consumers and as providers of goods and services. “If we talked about the customer’s brain, we might think differently,” he said, adding that neuroscience can help us understand how neural firing patterns create thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

Kepron pointed out that play is important to the brain’s growth because it lets us develop empathic behavior. “We’re wired for empathic connection,” said Kepron, who called the brain “the social organ.”







We are also wired to process new information, Kepron noted. He said the brain makes room for new information through a process known as “synaptic pruning,” in which old information is discarded if it isn’t frequently used. He observed that our brains crave novelty, which triggers the release of the chemical dopamine. “Dopamine moves into the neural system and we love it,” he said.

Kepron advised retailers and marketers to use storytelling techniques to create novel, in-store experiences for customers. He said that by drawing on “the power of experience” to create stories, companies can communicate a brand’s essence to consumers.

David Kepron believes that neuroscience can help us understand how neural firing patterns create thoughts, feelings and behaviors.
Kepron advised retailers and marketers to use storytelling techniques to create novel, in-store experiences for customers.
“Brands have stories, brands love stories,” Kepron said. “Your brain is activated as if it’s in the story. It has the ability to stick you in space and time within the story.” He advised the Summit audience, “If you want to push a new brand into market, tag it with experience.”

Referencing the classic movie, “The Wizard of Oz,” Kepron said that experiences allow us to stretch our brains beyond the “cognitive Kansas” into the realm of imagination. He pointed out that Dorothy, the movie’s protagonist whose unconscious mind imagined Oz, didn’t go there alone. She went with her friends the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion. “Oz wasn’t a space that held stuff, it was a place which held memories and rituals,” Kepron said.

He pointed out that Marriott creates powerful experiences for its customers by “bringing them to the essential places of wonder.”

Describing how technology is shaping our world as well as our brains, Kepron postulated that information overload and our increasing involvement with electronic devices may be leading to loss of empathy. He said this trend is creating a narrowly focused consumer culture that consists of “a market segment of one.”

On the positive side, Kepron asserted that “the power of digital technology, gives us the intrinsic ability to extend one shopper’s mind to the world. It lets us put together a multi-dimensional, digitally connected cognitive coalition of like-minded loyalists.”

According to Kepron, “The retail world is no longer a two-dimensional landscape, it’s a three-dimensional, interactive, multi-layered sphere of interdependencies” that produces “a creative collaborative consumerism.” The “shareability” of the experience is a key factor for engagement, he said, adding that making meaning and sharing it with others is characteristic of a new type of “creative, collaborative consumerism” which he called, “the brand of we.”

akarp@jobson.com