Designing experiences customers notice

Think about your morning coffee. You order the usual, tap your card, and check your messages while you drink. The aroma, the warmth of the cup, and the taste of the first sip barely register. The coffee was consumed, but was it experienced?

Much consumption has always run below awareness, guided by habits, defaults, and cues we rarely notice. What has changed is the scale. Subscriptions renew themselves, one-click checkouts remove deliberation, and smart assistants increasingly search, compare, and buy for us.

As this happens, consumers may become less aware of how and why they choose. For brands, the risk is invisibility. A brand chosen by habit or by a ranking, and never really experienced, is easily replaced.

Value lives in consciousness

In our book, Consumer Consciousness: From Sensation to Digital Perception, Olivia Petit and I describe consumer consciousness as a controlled hallucination of the value of offerings. The value of that coffee is not simply in the cup. The brain predicts what it will taste and feel like from expectations, memories, and context, and builds the experience from sensory signals at each touchpoint. The senses are therefore where value enters consciousness: what customers see, hear, smell, touch, and taste is the raw material of the experience, and when several senses tell the same story, it becomes much harder to overlook.

We distinguish two levels: phenomenal consciousness is the lived moment of smell, warmth, and sound, while metacognitive consciousness is the reflective level where we notice, interpret, and judge what we experience. Loyalty needs both. What is lived but never reflected on is rarely remembered, recommended, or defended when a cheaper alternative appears.

Traditional marketing has long relied on unconscious influence, using shelf placement, portion sizing, and behavioral nudges to steer choice without the chooser noticing. However, unconscious nudges can produce fragile, short-lived effects, and build little recognizable value in the customer's mind. Furthermore, relying solely on minor nudges distracts companies from building genuine customer relationships and broader structural, societal, impact. The answer is not to add friction back for its own sake. It is to design a few multisensory moments, where the senses work together clearly enough to be noticed and meaningfully enough to be reflected on.

Designing experiences

Three principles illustrate how to design meaningful moments that reach consciousness.

1. First, make the senses work together. In Seoul, Dunkin' Donuts released a coffee aroma on buses whenever its radio jingle played, linking smell, sound, and a nearby store into one noticeable moment.
2. Second, think in sensory ecosystems, ensuring touchpoints tell a coherent story about what a brand stands for.
3. Third, invite reflection. Simple prompts shift experience from automatic to reflective, such as augmented reality showing a sofa in your living room to help you think through a choice.

At the heart of the book is the 'conscioumer': an ethically aware, reflective, and engaged individual whose choices align with personal, societal, and environmental values. Such customers do not need to be steered; they need experiences rich enough to notice and transparent enough to understand.

Customers trust brands when they understand what those brands do for them and feel they remain the authors of their choices. When that sense of agency slips, convenience turns into unease. Reaching consciousness differs from capturing attention: the goal is fewer, better-designed moments that respect customers' time and judgement.

Managers should map which decisions in the customer journey now happen on autopilot, and choose one or two moments—such as unboxing, first use, or reordering—to make the customer conscious of.

Leaders should measure what customers remember, not just speed and conversion. They should also treat transparency and consent as part of the experience rather than legal obligations.