“What in tarnation?!”
I never wondered what the word “tarnation” meant until an article popped up in my feed about it this week. Is it even a real word, I wondered? Yes, it is. Link: https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/what-in-tarnation-meaning
Even more interesting, though, is the fact that the character most associated with “tarnation” – Yosemite Sam – never said it in any of the original cartoons!
I would have sworn he did, but it turns out to be a “false memory.”
Other people would have sworn it, too, but we all suffer from something called “The Mandela Effect” – a memory that isn’t actually true despite being shared by a large group of people. Darth Vader never said “Luke, I am your father.” The Monopoly Man never wore a monocle. Link: https://health.clevelandclinic.org/mandela-effect
The existence of false memories poses in interesting challenge in #cx.
Memories are all a customer has left of a past experience. They are what guides our decisions about where to shop, who to trust, and what to do.
If customers have false memories of you or your products they might: 1) hold things against your company that you never actually did, 2) tell people they had a certain experience that they never really had (link: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-04010-001).
I’ve just started exploring this phenomenon so I’m not sure how, if at all, we should think about it. But it’s a good reminder of how complex the phenomena of experience, memory, and decision making are!
