Seeing is believing: how experiences shape behaviour

What does it actually take to change someone's behaviour through an experience? That's the question we brought to Menier Penthouse in April, when we gathered a room of brand and experience professionals for a morning of keynotes, workshops and honest conversation. Here's what came out of it.

Robyn Landau, co-founder of Kinda Studios, opened the morning with a keynote on how our brains and bodies respond to the environments we design. The short version: it's more powerful than most of us realise.

Uncertainty is a neurological event

When the brain tags a situation as unpredictable, it triggers a stress response that narrows thinking, reduces creativity and makes decision-making harder. Around 70 - 80% of people report feeling overwhelmed by the current pace of change. People are turning to brands to help them feel more stable, and well-designed experiences are one of the most effective ways to do that.

Three levers for behaviour change

Robyn outlined three themes that drive attendees to action:

• Human connection - shared experiences trigger synchrony: our heart rates, emotions and behaviours begin to sync. This releases oxytocin, the bonding chemical, which builds trust and expands generosity. Shared experience moves people from 'me' to 'we'.

• Multi-sensory memory-making - the brain filters what's worth paying attention to. Experiences that engage multiple senses in coherence, not isolation, create lasting episodic memories.

• Emotional engagement - emotions live in the body first. They guide all decision-making. Get specific about the emotion you want people to feel and design backwards from the one you're targeting.

Five steps for putting it into practice

• Identify the goal - how do you want people to feel, and how do you want your brand to show up?

• Target the emotional state - emotions like joy and delight versus emotions like calm and contentment require different design approaches.

• Audit your ingredients - story, space, sound, light, materiality, movement. What do you have to work with?

• Design for coherence - think about how the ingredients work together, not individually.

• Ensure cultural relevance - especially when working globally. Aesthetic preferences are not universal.

The workshop asked each table to map a real challenge through a from/to lens: diagnosing the friction, defining the emotional state, and designing the moment of shift.

Where everyone started

Across attendee confidence, consumer trust, live event engagement and brand awareness, almost every table began in the same emotional territory: overwhelmed, sceptical, disconnected, uncertain about why they were there. Physically present, mentally elsewhere. Remembering nothing, because nothing had cut through.

Where everyone wanted to arrive

Almost every table wanted the same destination, feeling seen and trusted, clear on why this matters to them personally, remembering one specific moment rather than the whole event, and motivated to do something, carry on a conversation, share with their network, or take a next step.

The gap between those two states is where experience design lives.

The friction points that kept coming up

• Arrival - people scan for safety within seconds. If they don't find it, you're already on the back foot.

• Role confusion - not knowing why they're there creates disconnection before anything has begun.

• Information overload - too much, too fast, with no personal anchor, leads to shutdown rather than engagement.

• No clear reason to stay - showing up is the easy part. Getting people to arrive mentally is the design challenge.

Robyn Landau, Alex Bright and Kelly McCormack, hosted by Nicola J. Davis, then unpacked what separates experiences people forget from those that actually change behaviour.

On choice and control

Choosing to attend a physical event in 2026 is itself a signal. Someone has decided this is worth their time and presence. The design job is to meet that decision with an experience that justifies it, content in formats that hold attention, space that invites movement, and enough autonomy that people feel like participants rather than an audience.

On priming

The before matters as much as the during. TED's code of conduct for new attendees, ‘establishing openness over deal-making’, fundamentally changed how people showed up. An immersive theatre production asked audience members to inhabit a new persona before entering the space. Small decisions like this, made before anyone walks through the door, can shape everything that follows.

On safety and authenticity

Small permissions make a big difference: explicitly inviting people to bring drinks, signalling that phones are welcome, telling speakers it's fine to have notes. The brand that keeps showing up for what it believes in, across every touchpoint, is the one that earns recall.

On segmentation

Segment your audience beforehand, not at the event itself. Once people are there, design for shared human needs, they need to feel like the experience was made for them. Give them room to find their own way through it, but not so much room that they get lost.

Lastly, we asked the panel what will separate memorable experiences in the next 12 months…

Robyn: learning. Create opportunities for people to discover something new about themselves. Not cognitive learning necessarily, experiencing something differently, feeling something they didn't expect. That's what gets encoded.

Alex: value. Be clear about what someone takes away, whether it's a tool, a relationship, a behaviour change. The more durable the value, the more durable the memory.

Kelly: psychological value. The intangible stuff is what we're really designing for. Until we can measure emotional impact over time, the signal is the behaviours that follow: the connections made, the traffic, the recommendations. A good experience leaves a trail.

As ever, the best part was the room itself, the challenges people brought, the things they were willing to admit out loud, and the conversations that carried on long after the panel wrapped. We'll be back with the next Experience Exchange soon!

Experience Exchange is our ongoing series bringing together people who care about how experience shapes behaviour. Find out more from Ana at agarcia@audience.co.uk.