Ep.72 BUILDING BETTER BUYING EXPERIENCES BY USING BRAIN SCIENCE with Tara Haase Hieminga, Elevated Shopper Experience, Global Lead, Mondelez International

ABOUT TARA HAASE HIEMINGA:

LINKEDIN PROFILE:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/tara-haase-hieminga-48124621/

TARA'S BIO:

Tara Haase Hieminga is the Elevated Shopper Experience Global Lead at Mondelez International. With more than 12 years at Mondelez he has previously held roles such as Senior Manager Shopper Marketing & In-Store Merchandising, Sr. Manager Design & Digital Engagement. Prior to Mondelez, Tara was at Kraft Food Group as the Design Strategy Leader and before that, she worked for Mars as the Brand Manager, Candy and In-Store Marketing Manager for Snackfoods.

SHOW INTRO:

Welcome to the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast.

EPISODE 72… and my conversation with Tara Haase Hieminga. 

On the podacast our dynamic dialogues based on our acronym DATA - design, architecture, technology, and the arts crosses over disciplines but maintains a common thread of people who are passionate about the world we live in and human’s influence on it, the ways we craft the built environment to maximize human experience, increasing our understanding of human behavior and searching for the New Possible.    

The NXTLVL Experience Design podcast is presented by VMSD Magazine part of the Smartwork Media family of brands.

VMSD brings us, in the brand experience world, the International Retail Design Conference. The IRDC is one of the best retail design conferences that there is bringing together the world of retailers, brands and experience place makers every year for two days of engaging conversations and pushing the discourse forward on what makes retailing relevant. 

You will find the archive of the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast on VMSD.com.

Thanks also goes to Shop Association the only global retail trade association dedicated to elevating the in-store experience. 

SHOP Association represents companies and affiliates from 25 countries and brings value to their members through research, networking, education, events and awards. Check then out on SHOPAssociation.org

Tara Haase Hiemanga who is the Global Lead for Elevated Shopper Experiences at Mondelez.

She is using an understanding of neuroscience to enhance customer experiences across a number of the Mondelez brands. What brands are those, well there is a pretty big list but let me just say a few of my favorites – OREO, Toblerone, Cadbury, Wheat Thins and I could go on…

We’ll get to all of that in a moment but first though, a few thoughts…

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Back around 2008, 9 and 10 my wife was studying interpersonal neurobiology with Dr. Dan Siegel. 

I used to come downstairs and listen to her and all the videos she was watching and various conversations she was having and I was often saying ‘wow that really replies to the work that I'm doing in trying to create retail stores.’

As I listened it became clearer and clearer to me that I could perhaps rely on the lessons of understanding neuroscience as being the core driver to customer experience rather than simply thinking of it in terms of psychology, demographics and culture.

What fascinated me then and still continues today is the idea that – there was something beyond simple psychology that we would be able to use to design better stores something that would relate to almost all humans in terms of how they understood environments specifically how they would look through product assortments, identify key item presentations, understand graphics, and how color, pattern and texture would all come together to either hinder or help decision making in the shopping aisle.

Interestingly, back in the day, it took me a little while to get into architecture. I'd had a great time in junior college but my grades weren't great so I ended up enrolling in a Bachelor of Science in psychology which I was fascinated in anyway because I wanted to understand human dynamics but, I also had a sense that there was something deeply rooted and not just how buildings looked from the design point of view and but how they made people feel from an embodied / sensory point of view. 

And so, when I finally got into architecture a lot of my thinking about design was about how these places that we were creating would have qualities about them that would make people feel a certain way.

I sometimes used to say that I didn't care whether you loved it or hated it (of course I hoped you loved it) but I wanted to make sure that you felt something as you were experiencing some place. 

And that later in my retail design career that you were satisfied with the experiences as well as the things that you bought in the store.

In 2012 I did a presentation at global shop that was ostensibly about emotions and how we had to begin to understand that creating stores was about building e