Environment ALWAYS Drives Experience (Airline Food Edition)

The environment plays a major role in how you think, feel, and behave. So much so – you can’t really separate an experience from the immersive setting in which you had it. Being aware of the environment/experience link can be a superpower. 

I realize how normatively obvious that sounds. But it gets abnormally weird too, because the marketing industry has been doing it to us for years. Beyond psychology too. Let’s take a journey to the land of airline food for an example. 

Via Kitty Drake’s Financial Times piece, “The airline industry is in trouble. Is bottomless caviar the answer?”*

From a purely scientific perspective, the creation of a decent aeroplane meal is an elusive goal. At 35,000ft, the human tongue goes partially numb, causing you to lose about one-third of your tastebuds. The microclimate of an aeroplane is drier than most deserts, which ahs an effect on the nose roughly equivalent to stuffing one nostril with toilet paper. Even the sound of the engine changes the way food tastes. Exposure to the background noise of an aeroplane, which can reach 80-85dB, dulls your sensitivity to salty and sugary flavours, while enhancing your perception of the proteinous fifth taste, umami. This explains the enduring love affair between air passengers and tomato juice, which is ordered as much as beer in flight. If you drink it in the sky, it will taste richer, more savoury, and less acidic. 

There you have it. You can’t talk about experience without also talking about the environment the experience occurred in. 

Ever. 

Who, What, Where, When, Why, How, etc. They’re all a part of our environmental context. They’re the ever-influencing backdrop we make choices and judgments against. 

Whatever we’re selling (figuratively or literally), we want to know which details the environment is accenting. The lesson from the airline industry is to remember each environment has a different set of rules. When we accept each experience is context dependent, we can start identifying the context clues behind every decision. 

*I’ve been sitting on a note about this post for over a year apparently. I remember telling my fiancé how I read an article that explained her deep love for Bloody Mary mix on flights. It’s a perfect mix of obscure yet obvious applied science. The meta connection between environment and experience is everywhere, examples like this just help bring it to light. Not to mention, once you start considering how this principle is applied by smart marketers everywhere, you can’t unsee it.

ps. if you haven’t tried a can of tomato juice in the air, what are you waiting for?