TLDR: The Psychology of Opening Wallets
Here's what you're about to discover: why cruise ships generate 30% more spending per passenger than land-based tourism, how luxury trains are selling out by engineering suspended time, and why music festivals turn sensible people into impulsive buyers.
More importantly, you'll learn the specific design principles that create these effects, how to manufacture "liminal states" in any environment, and why the first 15 seconds of any experience determine whether people spend freely or guard their wallets.
Think of this as a field guide to the spaces where normal financial caution dissolves, and how to build them yourself. By the end, you'll understand why the threshold isn't just an entrance, it's a psychological lever that can transform how people relate to your brand and their money…
I've been thinking a lot about liminality. The spaces, times, and dynamics that exist between, where routine loosens its grip and something new tries to take shape.
Summer always brings this to the surface. I had my holiday months ago, but now the office is running its annual stop-start fugue, colleagues coming and going, work half-paused as everyone shuffles through their allotted breaks. Some days you catch someone just before they disappear to Greece; other days, you're facing a wall of out-of-office replies and a silence that feels vaguely illicit.
This professional limbo got me thinking about the peculiar power of in-between states. Not just in the calendar, but in the built environments and cultural events designed precisely to manufacture this kind of psychological drift.
Back when the PlayStation 3 was the hot new thing, I desperately wanted one. As a kid, I quickly learned that timing was everything when asking my parents for something big. I knew better than to launch my console campaign when they were stressing about work or dealing with my siblings' latest domestic crisis.
Instead, I waited for those rare moments when they were relaxing, laughing, and already saying yes to things. This strategy worked like a charm. Catching my parents in a good mood made them infinitely more receptive to my requests. My younger self felt like he'd discovered a cheat code to life.
It wasn't just about what I asked for, but how open they were to hearing it. That childhood insight about receptivity being everything turns out to be one of the most powerful principles in experience design. Who knew that pestering parents for gaming equipment would later inform professional practice?
Why Liminality Works (And Why Brands Are Obsessing Over It)
Liminality, literally "the threshold," describes those moments when the old order gives way but the new hasn't quite arrived. Victor Turner mapped it in ancient rituals; now it's showing up in the spaces and times we least expect. The ordinary rules don't quite apply. People are feeling receptive, becoming suggestible, and shopping for something different. Sometimes almost anything different.
"Our brains process new environments within seconds, forming lasting impressions through what psychologists call the 'primacy effect.'"
Research confirms what experience designers have been intuiting: experiential purchases like trips and concerts yield higher reported happiness than material goods. More intriguingly, temporal landmarks (departures, new seasons, birthdays) trigger "fresh-start" effects that raise openness to change.
At the point of purchase, brain imaging reveals the mechanics working: activation in reward regions predicts buying, while price "pain" in the insula predicts refusal. Liminal environments systematically tip this balance, lighting up pleasure while dimming financial anxiety. When we encounter positive stimuli, our brains release dopamine, the neurotransmitter of anticipation and reward, priming us for more generous decision-making.
It's rather like catching your parents in that perfect mood, scaled up to commercial architecture.
Want to learn more about turning spaces into profit engines? Visit us at insogni.com.
The New Golden Age of Trains: Travel as Prolonged Threshold
The renaissance in luxury train travel isn't nostalgia; it's the seduction of the suspended state. Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, Japan's Shiki-Shima, South Africa's Rovos Rail each has recast the train as a moving world where time stretches, signals drop out, and daily habits become irrelevant.
Step aboard and the familiar anchors of decision-making dissolve. Meals arrive at prescribed intervals, landscapes flow past like meditation, and fellow passengers become temporary confidants in ways that would seem absurd back home. The train creates what Turner called communitas, temporary egalitarian communities where normal hierarchies soften.
Distance shifts mental construal; far events get represented abstractly, which changes how we weigh payoffs versus probabilities. On a train, removed from familiar contexts, we become more willing to take risks. We're ordering wine we'd never buy at home, striking up conversations with strangers, booking that off-route excursion we'd normally research to death.
"There's something deliciously subversive about surrendering control to the rhythm of the tracks while simultaneously loosening control over our wallets."
Cruises: Purpose-Built Laboratories for the Liminal
If trains offer liminality by accident, cruise ships are engineering purpose-built hothouses.
The numbers tell the story:
31.7 million ocean passengers in 2023 (107% of pre-pandemic levels)
Continued growth projections across all major lines
Purpose-built psychological environments generating measurable behavioural change
The psychology isn't accidental. Cruise ships are operating as floating laboratories for engineered in-betweenness.
Step onboard and the familiar evaporates: endless corridors, round-the-clock lighting, pre-paid meals, and entertainment blur the boundaries of time and self. The ship becomes what anthropologists term a "floating metaworld," a contained universe where normal social and economic rules become suspended.
The Revenue Reality
Norwegian Cruise Line: $126.85 average daily onboard spend per passenger in 2024
Money flows because the largest outlay is prepaid, making add-ons feel decoupled from cost. It's classic mental accounting: windfalls get spent more freely and hedonically than regular income, and in the cruise context, every day feels like found money.
Music Festivals: Temporary Societies, Permanent Effects
Then there's the music festival, a blank slate city erected for a weekend, with its own rituals, hierarchies, and currencies. Here, the rules of daily life aren't suspended; they're getting rewritten entirely.
Festivals create what researchers call "safe spaces for identity experimentation," environments where risk-taking balances with community support. Attendees shed the expectations of daily life, adopting temporary personas that would feel performative back home but seem utterly natural within the festival's boundaries.
The spending data is remarkable:
Cashless festival systems lift on-site spend by 15-30% after implementation
Cards and RFID wristbands raise willingness-to-pay versus cash
Less "payment transparency" means higher bids for everything
The festival becomes a laboratory for testing new versions of yourself, with each transaction serving as evidence of your temporary transformation.
The Mechanics: Why the In-Between Changes Us
What unites these environments is their systematic dissolution of normal decision-making anchors. Novelty-seeking ties to exploratory behaviour and impulsive decisions, and liminal spaces are novelty distilled into architecture.
Greater tolerance for ambiguity correlates with real-world risk-taking, and these environments manufacture ambiguity at scale. Time becomes fluid, social roles shift, and familiar price reference points disappear.
Before travel, people tend to underestimate safety and time-related risks while overestimating transport risks. This cognitive quirk persists throughout the journey, making everything from expensive cocktails to spontaneous detours feel more reasonable than they would at home.
"It's as if these spaces have discovered the grown-up equivalent of catching parents in a good mood, except the parents are our own rational faculties."
Designing Artificial Liminality: The Art of Manufacturing Magic
The threshold isn't background noise; it's the main event. Think of it as the opening page in a book: the gateway that hooks visitors into your brand's story and makes them want more.
Understanding how these spaces work reveals principles for any environment designed to shift behaviour or perception.
1. Control the Entry Experience
The first moments in any space set the psychological tone for everything that follows.
This is why I regularly plead with clients to enclose the space. Open sight lines might be visually pleasing, but they're worth nothing compared to controlling the psychological mechanics of an installation. There needs to be a definitive break between exterior and interior worlds, a seamless yet profound transition that ushers customers into a new narrative.
I've learned that arguing for walls can feel counterintuitive to clients obsessing over "flow" and "openness." But psychological transformation requires psychological boundaries. You can't manufacture wonder when people can still see the car park.
2. Remove Familiar Anchors
Clocks, typical signage, everyday reference points all tether people to normal decision-making patterns. Their strategic absence creates productive disorientation.
Casinos perfected this decades ago, removing windows and time cues to extend gambling sessions. Forward-thinking retailers are finally catching up, understanding that temporal disruption makes people more present and more pliable.
3. Engage Multiple Senses
Sensory cues (lighting, scent, sound) play crucial roles in shaping initial perceptions. These elements can be strategically designed within the threshold area to enhance the overall experience.
Ambient lighting, pleasant scents, and appropriate background music create multisensory experiences that elevate mood and make spaces more inviting. The goal isn't sensory bombardment; it's sensory choreography.
4. Encourage Mental Bundling
Pre-paid packages, membership models, or "inclusive" pricing structures all work by front-loading financial commitment. Once the major decision is made, everything else feels like an implementation detail rather than a spending choice.
The prepayment effect compounds psychological distance from individual costs.
5. Amplify Social Proof
In contained environments, peer behaviour becomes hypervisible. Design spaces where desirable actions become naturally observable, whether that's trying new products, engaging with installations, or simply lingering longer than usual.
People watch people, and spending begets spending.
Masters of the Threshold: Case Studies in Liminal Design
Several visionary projects demonstrate these principles working in action.
Meow Wolf's House of Eternal Return
Transforms the threshold into adventure itself. Visitors enter through a seemingly ordinary house, only to discover hidden passageways leading to fantastical realms. This immediate transition from mundane to extraordinary captivates visitors and sets the tone for profound engagement.
The genius lies in the bait-and-switch: you think you're entering someone's suburban living room, then suddenly you're crawling through a washing machine into another dimension. It's domestic familiarity weaponised as psychological preparation for the impossible.
Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience
Envelops visitors in the artist's world from the moment they step inside. Giant projections, ambient music, and carefully curated scents create a multisensory introduction that immediately dissolves the boundary between observer and art.
Sleep No More by Punchdrunk
Begins its narrative journey at the threshold. Guests enter a 1930s hotel, greeted by actors in character and an atmosphere thick with intrigue. The immersive environment starts right at the door, ensuring that from the very first step, visitors are becoming part of the unfolding drama.
Each of these experiences understands that the threshold isn't merely functional; it's transformational. They're not just designing entrances; they're engineering psychological states.
The Business Case for Liminal Design
From a business perspective, prioritising the threshold yields substantial ROI:
The compelling statistics:
Improving customer experience can boost revenue by up to 10%
Increasing retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by 25-95%
Customers are 45% more likely to make purchases when their initial experience is positive and engaging
"The first 15 seconds within any environment are critical in determining whether someone stays and explores or leaves."
This isn't just about aesthetics; it's about engineering psychological states that make people more open, more generous, more willing to say yes to the unexpected.
Rather like discovering that timing your PlayStation requests perfectly could turn a definite "no" into an enthusiastic "maybe we can talk about it."
The Threshold as Strategy
The world's most interesting growth stories are happening at the threshold, between here and there, now and next. From cruise decks to sleeper cars to festival fields, liminality isn't a bug in the system. It's becoming the new system.
Smart experience designers understand that the goal isn't just creating beautiful spaces or memorable moments. It's creating productive psychological states, conditions where people become more receptive to transformation, connection, and yes, conversion.
The summer office fugue will end, colleagues will return, and normal rhythms will reassert themselves. But the lessons of the liminal remain: sometimes the most powerful experiences happen not when we've arrived, but when we're beautifully, productively lost between destinations.
The threshold isn't just the first step; it's everything.
And unlike pestering parents for gaming equipment, this particular cheat code actually scales.
Insogni specializes in crafting immersive brand experiences that harness the transformative power of liminal design. Want to learn more about turning thresholds into business opportunities? Visit us at insogni.com.
Absolutely fascinating!
Increasing retention is key and, for sure, highly profitable !
PS : yes I've read it all from top to bottom