The nature of consumption

In 2008, researchers at Caltech and Stanford conducted an experiment in which they asked around twenty participants to lie inside an MRI scanner while wine was dripped into their mouths through a small tube. The participants were told they were tasting several wines at different price points. In fact, one wine was presented twice: once as a $10 bottle and once as a $90 bottle. The participants generally rated the $90 wine as better. That part was hardly surprising. Everyone has been influenced by a price tag at some point. What was surprising was what the scans revealed: when drinking the wine labeled "$90," the brain region directly associated with pleasure was indeed more active. In other words, the participants weren't just being polite or pretending to know more about wine than they did. They genuinely enjoyed it more.

Change the label on the same bottle of wine, and the taste changes. Every time I think about this experiment, it makes me a little uncomfortable, because it exposes a distinction we have grown accustomed to making: the product is real, the feeling is subjective; quality comes from the former, while the latter belongs to the bag of marketing tricks. But the experiment tells a different story. The feeling isn't something layered on top of the product. It is directly involved in determining whether the wine tastes good in the first place. Consumers pay for products and services. That's the part we can see on the surface. What they ultimately receive, and remember, is a feeling.

I. Before Paying, Clients Can Judge You Only by How You Make Them Feel

People who sell services tend to resist this idea. I've encountered plenty of highly capable professionals—lawyers, designers, consultants, and home renovation contractors—who share a simple conviction: do good work, and clients will recognize it. Websites, company profiles, and document formatting are just packaging, nice extras that add a little polish. There's something admirable about this belief. The problem is that it overlooks a crucial time lag. The quality of a service only becomes apparent after it has been delivered. Hire a lawyer, and you won't know how good they are until the case is over. Hire a renovation company, and you may have to wait two or three years to find out whether the walls will crack. Yet payment comes first, and the contract is signed first. Between paying and seeing the results, clients have to make a judgment. And the only evidence available to them is what you put in front of them before delivery: a website, a company profile, a WeChat reply, a quote, or a proposal.

So, what professionals dismiss as "packaging" isn't packaging at all from the client's perspective. It's evidence—and often the only evidence they have. Economics has a concept called signaling. When buyers and sellers have unequal information, the more capable party needs to send a signal that an incapable one would find too costly to imitate, making their true quality recognizable. A doctor's white coat, a law firm's solid-wood reception desk, Apple's long wooden tables in its stores—none of these things serves much practical function. What they offer is a kind of collateral: I've invested in this, and I'm here for the long haul, not just to make a quick buck and leave. Conversely, a service provider whose website still uses an outdated template, whose quotes rely on Word's default fonts, or whose proposals contain typos may be genuinely excellent at the work itself. But before paying, clients have no way of knowing that. People who complain that clients don't recognize quality often haven't even put that quality on display.

II. Everything Before Delivery Is Already Part of the Delivery

These pre-delivery details affect more than whether you get chosen. A client's evaluation of a service doesn't begin on the day the work starts. It begins with the very first interaction. How long it takes you to reply to the first WeChat message, whether your proposal follows a clear line of reasoning, whether your quote breaks down the items in an understandable way—all of this happens before delivery, yet it has already shaped the expectations in the client's mind. When the work is finally delivered, the client isn't experiencing your service on a blank slate. They're comparing it against the expectations you've already established. With the same quality of work, a rigorous first impression makes the client think, "Just as I expected." A casual, careless first impression puts them on the lookout for flaws, magnifying every minor issue into confirmation of what they suspected all along.

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman developed the peak-end rule, which holds that our memories of an experience aren't based on its average quality. They depend primarily on its most intense moment and how it ends. IKEA has applied this principle thoroughly. You might spend two hours shopping, finding products, waiting in line, and carrying boxes—a fairly exhausting experience. Yet the one-yuan ice cream cone at the exit can rewrite the memory of the entire trip as "pretty good." And what determines whether someone comes back or recommends you to a friend is precisely that memory, not the experience itself. Apple's attention to packaging follows the same logic. Those few seconds when the lid slowly lifts off a box are said to have been refined through repeated testing. The difference between a company that tests even the unboxing experience and one that believes a good product is all that matters isn't really about aesthetics. People who sell services often think their business begins only after a contract is signed. In the client's mind, your business started long ago. You're just the last person to realize it.

III. What People Buy Is the Person They Become After Buying

The previous sections explained where feelings come from. This one asks what those feelings contain. Consumers rarely care deeply about the details of a product. Specifications, craftsmanship, ingredient lists—most people glance at them and move on. What they really care about is something else: What kind of life will I lead after buying this? What kind of person will I be in the eyes of others? You can buy yoga pants with the same basic functionality as Lululemon's for a few dozen yuan. The premium buys an image: discipline, a comfortable margin in life, and a sense of responsibility for one's own body. Arc'teryx's rise in popularity in China over recent years has relatively little to do with an increase in the number of people who actually go mountaineering. It has become a marker of identity. Wear it, and people in certain circles will recognize you as one of their own. Pop Mart makes the point even more directly. The plastic figurine is often put on a shelf not long after being unboxed. What people are really paying for is those few seconds of uncertainty before the box is opened.

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz once wrote, in essence, that human beings are animals suspended in webs of significance they themselves have spun. In today's consumer society, that statement needs one word changed. The web is still there, but we are no longer the ones weaving it. Much of it is woven by businesses. Perhaps the most successful example is the diamond. Before De Beers launched "A Diamond Is Forever" in 1947, diamonds had no inherent connection to marriage. A piece of carbon, a line of advertising, and suddenly the two were bound together by the idea of "eternal love." Decades later, diamonds had become the default choice for marriage proposals in many places. Nothing about the diamond's physical properties had changed. A thread had simply been tied between a stone and a desire that already existed in the human heart.

At this point, many people would naturally reach a conclusion: if consumers buy feelings, and feelings can be manufactured, then it doesn't matter whether those feelings are real. I disagree. Return to the wine experiment at the beginning. The pleasure the participants experienced was not fake. Their brains were responding in a very real way. Feelings aren't a veneer laid over reality. They are part of reality itself. A piece of clothing that makes you stand taller when walking down the street, or a service that puts you at ease from beginning to end—these are genuine changes that take place. To call feelings fake is to underestimate their power.

IV. But Feelings Cannot Sustain Themselves

We need to turn a corner here, or the argument can easily slide into another dangerous conclusion: all I need to do is make the packaging look good. No. Feelings create expectations; products fulfill them. They are two consecutive links in the same chain, not alternatives to each other. Feelings determine whether you get chosen the first time. The product determines whether you get chosen again. If the first link breaks, no one will discover how good the work behind it is. If the second link breaks, the better you make the first impression, the greater the debt you accumulate.

Chicecream, a Chinese ice cream brand, is a classic example. From the beginning, it positioned itself as a premium product, emphasizing ingredients, craftsmanship, and the sophistication of a single ice cream bar. This narrative worked in the early days. But when its products appeared in ordinary convenience-store freezers, consumers would casually pick up a bar and discover the price only at checkout. At that moment, the feeling wasn't luxury. It was being ripped off. In the summer of 2022, the Chinese term "ice cream assassin" spread rapidly to describe expensive ice creams that ambushed unsuspecting buyers at checkout. To some extent, it was an act of retaliation. The higher the expectations, the greater the anger when they went unmet—far out of proportion to what a single ice cream bar should warrant.

Luckin Coffee took a different path. In its early days, subsidies and relentless marketing drew people into its stores. That was the emotional layer. What eventually established the brand was the development of products people repeatedly came back for, such as its coconut latte. That was the fulfillment layer. Both have to work. Packaging is a promise, and promises must be kept.

V. What Can Service Providers Actually Do?

My advice is to start with something simple, even tedious: map every point of contact between the moment a client first hears about you and the moment they finally pay. Where do they hear about you? What do they see first? What appears when they click through? How do they get in touch? How long does it take you to respond? What does the first document they receive look like? How do you present your quote? Once you've listed everything, ask yourself one question about each item: What is this telling the client? Most people who complete this exercise discover that half their touchpoints are effectively saying, "We just do this casually." And the clients have received every one of those signals.

As you build this list, consistency matters more than polish. Every touchpoint should convey the same feeling. If you're selling rigor, your quote cannot contain typos. If you're selling ease, your website shouldn't sound like a stiff corporate brochure. Mix incompatible styles here and there, and clients won't perceive two sets of strengths. They'll simply think, "I can't tell who you are." Another task is to turn abstract capabilities into tangible evidence. The statement "We're highly professional" conveys almost no information. Everyone says it. Replace it with "Here's our project workflow document" or "Here's a post-project review from a similar engagement," and the client has something concrete to evaluate. Capabilities themselves are invisible. The evidence they leave behind can be seen.

VI. Back to That Glass of Wine

Those participants weren't stupid. Faced with limited information, they made a judgment using the only available clue, and their bodies responded accordingly. Most consumers behave the same way. Saying that consumers buy feelings doesn't mean they're superficial. They can judge you only by what you put in front of them. If you hand over a sloppy quote, they'll conclude that you're sloppy. Given the information available to them, that judgment is perfectly reasonable. Rather than complain that clients can't recognize your expertise, make your expertise recognizable.