B&T doesn’t know much about marathons—aside from the now-defunct British chocolate bar. But plenty do and here, Leif Stromnes, managing director of strategy and growth at DDB Australia, explains why the older you get, the more likely you are to put on your runners and go for a short 40-odd km jog and what that phenomenon means for marketers.
Each year, more than two million people run a marathon. After training for months, they rise early one weekend morning, lace up their shoes, and race 42.2 kilometers in one of the 4,100 marathons held annually around the world.
Many of these participants are running their very first marathon. By some estimates, about half the people in a typical marathon are first-timers.
To run a marathon, participants must register with race organizers and include their age.
Incredibly people in their 29th, 39th, 49th and 59th years are overrepresented among first-time marathoners by a whopping 48 per cent.
Across the entire lifespan, the age at which people are most likely to run their first marathon is 29. Twenty-nine-year-olds are about twice as likely to run a marathon as twenty-eight-year-olds or thirty-year-olds olds.
Meanwhile, first-time marathon participation declines in the early forties but spikes dramatically at age 49. Someone who is 49 is about three times more likely to run a marathon than someone who’s just a year older.
The energizing effect of the end of a decade doesn’t make logical sense. Chronological decades have little material significance. To a biologist or physician, the physiological differences between a forty-nine-year-old and a fifty-year-old are negligible. Nor do our circumstances diverge wildly in years that end in nine versus those that end in zero. Yet when people near the end of the arbitrary marker of a decade, something awakens in their minds and alters their behavior.
This is not the only anomaly. Within the marathons that first-timers are running, there are 51.4 per cent more finishers in the minute before the four-hour mark (the dark line in the image below) than there are in the minute after the four-hour mark. The same pattern holds for all thirty-minute increments from three hours to five hours.
In 1991, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman developed a theory called “peak end rule” by studying patient experiences during colonoscopies. The rule says that when we remember an event we assign the greatest weight to its most intense moments (the peak) and how it culminates (the end). So, a shorter colonoscopy in which the final moments are painful is remembered as being worse than a longer colonoscopy that ends less unpleasantly, even if the latter procedure delivers substantially more total pain. We downplay how long an episode lasts – Kahneman calls it “duration neglect” and magnify what happens at the end. As we saw in the marathon examples, the peak moments and endings (the minute before four hours or the year before the end of a decade) are emotionally much more important to us. These peak moments and endings go on to shape many of our opinions, memories and subsequent decisions.
Brands often neglect peak end rule when they develop their customer journeys; either failing to build emotional peaks or disregarding the powerful encoding effect of the ending. In our desire to make purchases as easy as possible, we tend to take a category view to the journey and then “flatten” the experience to minimise interruptions for the purchaser. But filling potholes in the customer journey, whilst important, doesn’t create peak moments. It takes effort and boldness to create friction in the name of the brand, and it often feels counterintuitive to put effort into the ending when customers have already purchased. But neglecting this is worse. Marketers may end up with brand experiences that are attributed to someone else, forgotten, or at worst completely ignored.