The raccoon is a generalist. It doesn’t specialize in a single food or a single habitat; it survives thanks to curiosity, flexibility, and the ability to move quickly between options. It sniffs, touches, samples, and is always on to the next thing. The panda, by contrast, is a specialist. Its diet consists entirely of chewing bamboo leaves and stems, it lives in a single, precise habitat, and its daily routine is monotonous. What would happen if we dropped them both into a mall with a shopping budget?
The Human Brain: A Lover of Shortcuts
Discussions of consumer behavior tend to focus either on purchasing statistics on one hand, or on “customer experience” as an all-encompassing concept on the other. But beneath these lies a far deeper mechanism: the human brain, with its limitations, its preferences, and the way it manages energy.
The brain is an energetically expensive organ. Although it makes up only a few percent of body weight, it consumes roughly 20% of the body’s available energy at rest. This fact underlies a central insight in cognitive science: in its baseline state, the brain doesn’t “like to think” – it actually strives to conserve effort. To that end, it has developed shortcut mechanisms: habits, pattern recognition, and a preference for situations that reflect a recurring pattern. None of us plans out every morning exactly how to brush our teeth; it happens almost on its own, a routine of brushing. Have you ever stood in the shower and couldn’t remember whether you’d already shampooed your hair? That’s because the brain never gave it a thought. It was operating on autopilot, leaving no impression and expending minimal energy.
But our brain is not only a panda in search of stability and routine. It moves along the spectrum between adaptability and specialization, between searching and settling, between relying on the familiar and learning something new. And in order to create new learning, we have to pull the brain out of its comfort zone.
Mental Stimulation: Getting the Brain Out of Its Routine
As early as the 19th century, Wilhelm Wundt, one of the founders of experimental psychology, articulated a basic principle: mental activity, attention, and interest cannot exist in the absence of stimulation. But Wundt stressed an equally important point: over-stimulation is not beneficial, and can even be harmful. The brain needs a challenge in order to “wake up,” but when the challenge is too great, it experiences overload, confusion, or aversion, and once again seeks out the familiar—so that learning becomes ineffective. From this emerged an understanding that would serve psychology and behavioral economics in the decades that followed: the relationship between the intensity of a stimulus and a positive learning experience is not linear.
Out of this insight developed the principle known as the inverted-U curve: at stimulation levels that are too low we get boredom and disengagement, and at levels that are too high we get stress and cognitive fatigue. Only in the middle range – when there is a moderate deviation from the expected – does the brain function optimally. This principle became a cornerstone in the study of attention, learning, and emotion, and it rests on understanding the role of surprise. Surprise, according to this approach, is effective at engaging the brain only when it slightly unsettles the brain’s prediction of the expected routine, without collapsing it entirely.
Prediction Error: The Brain as a Full-Time Statistician
In the 20th century, Daniel Berlyne expanded the discussion, connecting the principles of stimulation to emotional experience and laying the foundations for what we might today call “interest management.” As the neurosciences developed, the principle received a biological grounding. Research led by the neurophysiologist Wolfram Schultz showed that moderate surprise activates the dopamine system, which is responsible for anticipation, seeking, and learning through prediction error.
Prediction error arises because the brain continuously analyzes reality statistically, searching for familiar patterns. When reality differs from what was expected, it tries to understand what happened: if the experience is worse than anticipated, it registers a negative prediction error; and if the experience is better than anticipated, that’s a positive prediction error, which releases dopamine.
At the same time, research has demonstrated that repetition and a sense of security are linked to the activity of other systems, including the release of endorphins, which create a feeling of well-being, ease, and “it’s good to be here.” These ideas, from psychology and neuroscience, paved the way for more applied models – among them the 70/30 principle.
70/30: The Brain’s Golden Ratio Between Routine and Stimulation
The 70/30 principle isn’t a mathematical law but a description of an experiential balance: an optimal experience for the brain is built from roughly 70% familiar, predictable, and safe components, and roughly 30% new, surprising, or pattern-breaking ones. The familiar part allows for energy conservation, reliance on existing schemas, and a sense of control and calm. The new part prevents boredom, activates curiosity, and encourages learning. When the ratio tilts too far toward the familiar, the brain “falls asleep.” When it tilts too far toward the new, the brain is flooded.
The practical application of the 70/30 principle has been demonstrated in several fields, and it stands out on digital platforms as well. Netflix, for example – interested in keeping us inside its worlds for as long as possible – is constantly offering new content. But it’s careful about dosage, and it blends the familiar and the new in a sophisticated way: shows you’ve already started watching, then similar shows in style or sequels, and then shows from the same genre and, finally, entirely different ones. The balance Netflix arrived at through trial and error is roughly 70/30 – 70% familiar content and 30% new content, introduced gradually.
Why “roughly”? Because there are differences by age (younger viewers want a bit more novelty) and by culture (in Japan people want less novelty than in Canada). This way, the brain feels it has a safe and familiar environment together with the stimulation of novelty. The result: it stays to see what happens, and every so often it also tries new things to one degree or another.
Spotify operates on the same principle. Listening studies show that most people listen again and again to the same songs. Novelty, when it comes, has to be precise. Algorithmic playlists blend familiar songs with new ones similar in style, alongside tastes of other genres. Here too the ratio of familiar to new varies across cultures and age groups, but on average it settles around 70/30.
On YouTube the dynamic is even sharper: the algorithm adjusts the level of surprise to the user’s cognitive tolerance, creating an experience with fresh stimulation that nonetheless isn’t chaotic. TikTok is more chaotic, but again, the shift in balance ranges from 80/20 to 60/40 – roughly 70/30 on average. In a world of artificial intelligence, the balance is becoming ever more personalized to you.
What Happens to the Consumer at the Mall? It Depends
Now let’s return to our raccoon and panda, with their shopping budget at the mall. The consumer experience here, too, should sit around 70/30: 70% familiar and beloved, 30% new and surprising. But the balance here is far more delicate, because the mall combines two different worlds: the world of the brand stores and the world that exists in the space between them. The consumer’s expectations in these two spaces are very different.
A brand store is a place where the consumer seeks security. That’s the whole point of a brand: a name and a logo associated with specific values, reflecting an experience. The consumer expects the same experience when walking into a brand store in Tel Aviv and in Jerusalem, in Amsterdam or in Berlin. They want to know how the products are displayed, what the shelving looks like, how the promotions work – even what the music will be or what it will smell like. The consumer enters a brand store with an actionable goal: whether intending to buy a specific product, or to check what’s new or what’s on sale. In the brand store, we’re pandas. Don’t move our bamboo around too much.
The mall, by contrast, is defined in consumer research as a touristic environment. The goal is not actionable and defined, but hedonic: we come to enjoy ourselves. We expect to be entertained and to have an interesting atmosphere created for us. The consumer doesn’t arrive with a single clear intention, but with a readiness to be exposed to things. Shop windows, scents, kiosks, people, and movement generate a stream of small surprises that maintain a moderate state of arousal. The mall is the kingdom of the raccoons.
Of course, the brain isn’t dichotomous. Even in a brand store, the brain wants a little surprise. It will want to see the new collection – but it will expect to see it in the place where new collections are usually displayed, just as it wants to know where the items on sale are. And in the mall too, the consumer definitely wants to know where the parking is, where the nearest restrooms are, and where the anchor stores are that help them navigate the mall space.
Marketing Plan: A Mall and a Store Are Not the Same Thing
This is why the marketing plan for a mall and the marketing plan for a brand store can’t be identical. True, the 70/30 principle operates in both – but in a brand store the emphasis should lean more toward the familiar and less toward the new (60/40), while a mall should place greater emphasis on the new and the ever-changing (80/20).
In the marketing and content plan for the brand store, the emphasis should be on reflecting a consistent experience that repeatedly conveys the brand’s values, while in the mall’s marketing plan the emphasis should be precisely on the new: the pop-up kiosk, the upcoming holiday events, the new store. The implication touches nearly every marketing dimension: from anchor events throughout the year to what the content plan on the website and social media will look like.
What Does the Consumer Want? It Depends Where They Are Right Now
When you examine the difference between a mall and a brand store through a neuro-cognitive lens, it turns out we’re dealing not merely with two different retail spaces, but with two distinct states of consciousness. The human brain needs both routine and surprise, both security and stimulation—but context determines which part is activated at any given moment. The mall activates the adaptive, seeking, scanning part. The brand store activates the specialized, devoted part that seeks out the expected. We’re raccoons when we roam the mall, and pandas from the moment our foot crosses into the brand store.
And this, of course, is true not only of malls and physical spaces. In digital products too, the question every organization or brand needs to ask itself is which state of consciousness the consumer is in right now: when to speak more to the panda, and when to let the raccoon roam.
