The contagion of neurologic Immersion predicts retail purchases

Abstract

Consumers increasingly demand extraordinary experiences and businesses want to provide such experiences to build loyalty and increase customer lifetime value. One of the most significant aspects of consumer experiences is employee-customer interactions. We hypothesized that the value of customers’ experiences would be reflected in the neurophysiology of sales associates and that these data would predict eventual purchases. We tested this hypothesis by measuring neurologic Immersion of sales associates serving customers (N = 56) in a field study in two luxury retail stores with actual customers. A synthetic dataset was generated from these data and showed that sales associates’ peak Immersion was positively associated with the time customers spent shopping, which, in turn, positively scaled with how much customers spent. Estimating a machine learning model using sales associates’ peak Immersion predicted which customers purchased with between 64% and 80% accuracy. Our results demonstrate that the neurophysiologic Immersion of one person can be used to predict the behavior of another person with whom they are interacting even when their goals may not be perfectly aligned. Moreover, we have shown that such a field study is feasible with real customers who are spending nontrivial amounts of money (M = $323, range: $0–$2,734). More generally, measuring the contagion of Immersion from one side of an interaction may be an effective way to assess and improve the quality of social engagements of many types.