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WHAT'S NEW IN THE WORLD OF EXPERIENCE
A collection of posts from our founder on all things experiential
Customers call it the best luxury experience they've ever had.
Customers call it the best luxury experience they've ever had. The CEO talks about its impact on earnings calls. Not something you hear every day. CEOs talk about revenue. Growth. Margins. Market share. The investments they believe will make their companies more valuable. When customer experience becomes part of that conversation, it's because the experience is moving those numbers. And that's an entirely different league. In luxury, extraordinary service is supposed to be th
The AHA Group
2 days ago1 min read
The Places Where Money is Not The Entry
There's a particular kind of ultra-wealthy individual who will spend six figures to get somewhere that money alone doesn't qualify them to be. For them, the distinction between buying access and earning achievement matters enormously. Money can get you there. Competence determines what happens next. Chasing first descents in the Patagonian Andes. Planning the next 6,000-meter summit. Debating remote expeditions where the helicopter transfer is the easy part. Imagine a private
The AHA Group
2 days ago2 min read
Best Practice or Expensive Mistake?
Some of the most expensive mistakes in luxury customer experience are celebrated as best practices. An experience can be delightful and commercially useless. It can be memorable and strategically irrelevant. It can win awards while eroding margin. Some of the very practices luxury companies celebrate as evidence of customer experience excellence can actually be evidence of strategic weakness, operational inefficiency, and poor capital allocation. And there is a reason these p
The AHA Group
2 days ago2 min read
It's The Same Two Blind Spots. Again & Again.
Across the world's leading ultra-luxury brands, I've encountered the same two blind spots. Again and again. I've seen them in boardrooms worldwide, among executives whose expertise is beyond question. 20+ years in luxury retail. You've mastered luxury retail. 20+ years in private aviation. You've mastered private aviation. 20+ years in private wealth. You've mastered private wealth. 20+ years in hospitality. You've mastered hospitality. 20+ years in private clubs. You've mast
The AHA Group
2 days ago2 min read
Luxury Yachts: That Deposit Signaled Intent - Not Certainty
A multi-millionaire books a six-figure voyage aboard an ultra-luxury branded yacht. The brand's most critical work is what happens next. We've just created an extraordinary experience for an ultra-luxury yacht brand that challenges one of the industry's most entrenched conventions and addresses a critical gap in the branded yacht model: the period between booking and embarkation. In the UHNW market, even a substantial deposit signals intent, not certainty. What happens before
The AHA Group
2 days ago2 min read
The Mistake So Many Private Clubs Are Making
Some of the world's most coveted private clubs are on their way to becoming tomorrow's most expensive irrelevancies. They're suffering from success-induced blindness. Initial desirability is no guarantee of sustained relevance among the ultra-wealthy. In three months, I've been inside the world's most exclusive private social clubs, from London and New York to Singapore. I belong to one of the finest. The divide is stark. Five observations: 1. Wealth has become a remarkably p
The AHA Group
3 days ago2 min read
Is Luxury Solving The Wrong Problem?
What if luxury's billion-dollar obsession with exceptional experiences is solving the wrong problem? The luxury industry has become extraordinarily good at producing moments of excellence. But when everyone is delivering their version of exceptional, exceptional stops being a meaningful distinction. Luxury has confused the sophistication of an experience with it's significance in someone's life. The real frontier at the top of luxury is far more ambitious: creating experience
The AHA Group
3 days ago2 min read
There’s a Reason CEOs Call Us.
Our work shows up in annual reports, SEC filings, investor briefings, earnings calls, and analyst reports. Record performance. Revenue growth. Market expansion. Customer loyalty. Enterprise-wide transformation. Not claims we made. Direct evidence in the most important conversations that CEOs and CFOs lead. These are results our clients reported to shareholders, analysts, and the market, directly attributing the impact to our work. And year-over-year performance results that s
The AHA Group
Oct 62 min read
My Personal Philosophy
I have never been particularly interested in moderation. Not because I think everything should be extreme, I just think there is something far more interesting in the combination of range, depth and intensity. And I've been thinking about those three things a lot lately. When something captures my attention, I tend to follow it a very long way. Horses led me to four years of varsity equestrian at Dartmouth, and a lifetime passion for jumping, dressage, cross-country, saddle s
The AHA Group
Oct 62 min read
My gut reaction was “That’s impressive... is it over yet.”
I was sitting with a luxury-brand CEO who had just spent an hour telling me all the stories he wants to tell his customers and all the ways he wants to bring his brand to life. He called it customer-centricity. I cringed. The brand was at the center. The customer, a prop. When did the customer become merely the audience for all of this? I find myself having some version of this reaction more and more with luxury CXOs. We are living through one of the great farces in luxury: b
The AHA Group
Oct 62 min read
Why We Built Our UHNW Archetype Model
I was in Wyoming yesterday for an event and found myself in the bar afterwards having drinks with three billionaires. We were discussing experiences, how expectations change over a lifetime, and how little companies really understand about the diversity of wealth and what it means to truly connect with someone whose net worth is ten figures. These are three men who made their fortunes in three completely different ways. Good friends. And yet largely indistinguishable to almos
The AHA Group
Oct 62 min read
“I am literally numb from the boredom and disappointment."
But I’m putting on a fake smile to get through the appointment.” I do this all the time in luxury. So do many HNW and UHNW customers. I spend much of my life inside ultra-luxury boutiques, hotels, residences and showrooms, as both buyer and adviser. The lapses in judgment, design, and execution at six- and seven-figure price points are something more serious: they expose how little of a brand’s celebrated discernment makes it to the guest. Here is my dirty [baker’s] dozen of
The AHA Group
Oct 62 min read
The Homogenization of Luxury Retail
At dinner last night, a VVIP client reduced billions of dollars of luxury retail investment to eight words: “The Salon is rare. The experience is anywhere.” Touché. I wanted to high-five him. If your luxury brand has private appointment spaces, this applies to you. Every luxury retailer we begin working with delivers some version of very nice, very ordinary luxury they have convinced themselves is special. The brands convinced they are even more exceptional are not exem
The AHA Group
Oct 62 min read
I evaluated billions of dollars of luxury spend targeted at the UHNW
Last week, I spent hours evaluating billions of dollars of luxury spend targeted at attracting the UHNW. If I’m honest, I was bored, really bored. Imagine the buyer. I was judging a major international branded residences competition, with brands including Armani, Karl Lagerfeld, Six Senses, St. Regis, etc. I went in expecting to see the future. Instead, after listening to some architects wax lyrically for 20 or 30 minutes about a groundbreaking new way of living, I found myse
The AHA Group
Oct 62 min read
Luxury Brands & UHNW in China
One of the most dangerous assumptions Western luxury brands can make in China is that the status they’ve earned over decades will continue to belong to them. It won’t. Across our work with luxury brands and UHNW clients in China, we are seeing the most sophisticated consumers quietly change the basis on which a brand earns its place in their purchasing hierarchy. Quiet luxury is one visible expression of it. But the more consequential shift is this: The burden of proof has mo
The AHA Group
Oct 62 min read
Luxury's Most Interesting Exception
Growth can be a remarkably effective blindfold. The stronger the numbers become, the easier it is to mistake market momentum for business strength. I rarely publish at this length on LinkedIn, but sometimes content only becomes truly useful when the evidence is allowed to accumulate. It is grounded in work we are doing now with a historic jewelry maison ready to question the conventions of the high jewelry experience itself. It examines what may be taking shape beneath one of
The AHA Group
Oct 61 min read
Bespoke Automobiles
“Why didn’t they do that?” is what owners of bespoke automobiles asked me over dinner in Monterey last week, as we compared Rolls-Royce Private Office, Bugatti Sur Mesure and Porsche Sonderwunsch commissioning experiences. As they described what each experience had been like, I shared a few ideas of my own. Not on the car. On the experience of commissioning it. That’s when I heard: “Why didn’t they do that?” More than once. Which is interesting given how much these programs a
The AHA Group
Oct 62 min read
The Challenge for Wealth Management
There is an industry that still believes deeply in the strength of its HNW client relationships. Yet only 17% of its wealthy clients say they are actually receiving a quality, personalized experience. And the data only gets worse for everyone in Wealth Management. In 2019, 39% of HNW clients relied on a single wealth management firm. Today, just 19% do, and 81% now maintain multiple relationships. That is a sizeable shift, but many firms will still tell you, “We’re exceptiona
The AHA Group
Oct 62 min read
Changing the Game in Luxury Hospitality
Our team just finished building a new hotel concept and brand for a client in the Middle East. And we built it in a way that fundamentally challenges how luxury hospitality has been developed for decades. We didn’t start with a location and ask what belonged there. And we didn’t build a beautiful asset and then ask a brand, service model and experience to make it distinctive. We reversed the entire logic. This developer and their investors understood that in a saturated ultra
The AHA Group
Aug 182 min read
HNW and UHNW customers aren’t fooled by your segmentation.
“I know exactly what they track, and I find it mildly offensive because it’s obvious and archaic. It has absolutely no value to me as a client.” said a tech millionaire. A few weeks ago I was at a dinner with UHNW customers of one of our clients, and we got onto the topic of how luxury brands segment “the wealthy.” UHNW individuals know they are being profiled this way. And the feedback was scathing. “I know that they use my net worth and purchasing patterns to put me into th
The AHA Group
Aug 182 min read
Ready to Make Your UHNW Customer Experience Exceptional?
Our clients contact us with a distinct business challenge in mind - how can they strengthen the experiences they deliver to their affluent and UHNW customers, better prepare their people to engage their customers, or simply how to win and retain more UHNW customers.
Sometimes that work begins with a consulting engagement. Other times, it is a one-day executive facilitation session, sales training, wealth briefing, or an UHNW keynote.
We welcome your inquiry through our contact page or directly to William Andrews at williama@ahaexperience.com.
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