Customer Experience

I was recently inside a luxury UHNW private club in the American West working with their leadership team. The conversation took an interesting turn, when I asked them this: What does the next generation of wealth actually want from your club? Are you evolving to attract that membership? The luxury private club market is reorganizing itself around a different idea of value. Most people in the industry still think this business is about amenities. It isn’t. The latest Forbes da

Loyalty programs can destroy a company’s ability to win new customers. This week I experienced it firsthand. And it was infuriating. I bought a last minute full-fare First Class ticket on an airline I rarely fly. It is routinely rated one of the best airlines in the United States. From the moment I boarded, the entire cabin experience revolved around loyalty members. The crew thanked status passengers one by one. I received nothing. They warmly welcomed their frequent flyers.

Across 90 experience audits, we test a claim leadership teams make with remarkable certainty. They assert they are delivering highly personalized experiences. On average, 82% of leadership teams begin with that assertion. When we measure the interactions directly, the numbers tell a very different story. Across our audits, we evaluate three progressively harder signals. 🔹 Transactional manners: Using the client’s name. Referencing preferences from the CRM. Recalling a prior

Not another brand. Not price. Not product. The competition is cognitive. Every elite client arrives with a private archive of Aman stays, F1 paddocks, invitation-only art dinners, yacht charters, medical retreats, and rooms you will never see on Instagram. They carry a portfolio of flawlessly executed experiences collected across continents, industries, and decades. So they are not comparing you to your category. They are assessing whether you introduce a contrast strong enou

Capital is flooding ultra luxury. Strategy is not. Billions are moving into branded residences, private clubs, private aviation, branded yachts. The renderings are beautiful. The pro formas are aggressive. The pitch decks are confident. But execution is lagging. In this tier, customer deposits and down payments are not brand leverage. Membership fees aren’t either. That “paid in full” carries no shackles. They can still walk away. UHNW buyers will abandon six and seven f

Your team created a "magical moment", but your client never came back. What went wrong? Leaders obsess over creating moments: Empower the front line; Create surprise; Deliver delight. It sounds progressive, but it is outdated and incomplete. If your team is still designing isolated moments, you are building compliments, not loyalty. For years, brands have been told to create magic in small bursts. But nice moments are now just service with polish. Unless they compound into so

In the top tier of wealth, access is assumed. So what remains scarce? Maya Angelou wrote, “People don’t remember what you said, they remember how you made them feel.” With UHNW individuals, this isn’t poetic advice. It’s a business reality. When someone can purchase almost anything, products lose their power to impress. When access is constant, service excellence becomes invisible. Even rarity fades because it can be acquired on demand. Only one thing endures. An experience t

The most dangerous place to build right now is the middle of luxury. Not the top. Not the value tier. The middle. Across all of luxury, the same pattern is emerging. Ultra-high-net-worth clients are still spending at the very top when the experience is unmistakably differentiated and impossible to replicate. Value-driven luxury buyers are trading down with precision. They want clarity and function. They are choosing brands that feel accessible, special, and approachable. What

I was asked several times this week what is the biggest challenge facing luxury hospitality? My message to industry executives is crystal clear: Luxury hospitality is quietly entering an experience surplus. For twenty years, the strategy was simple: add layers. More programming. More amenities. More personalization. More moments. That worked for a long time, but in the last 12 months, we’ve hit a hard inflection point, and most executive teams aren’t making the pivot fast e

The biggest myth in luxury branded residences is the brand creates all the value. Prime real estate. A famous logo. Beautiful amenities. What could go wrong? Plenty. And most of it is lethal to long-term value creation. Let’s start with the premise that owners want to live inside a fully experiential brand universe every time they step foot on property. That’s a big promise. This is what I’ve learned from my work in this space: 1) The Transience Fallacy Most brands authoring

Luxury brands who want to be world-class understand that operational excellence is just the start. That’s when our work begins...... I just returned from Korea following our phase-one launch of an experiential operating model our team built for a luxury medical and wellness client with ambitious international growth goals. Here’s a brief summary of the project: 💎 The Opportunity: In a market with limited experience differentiation, the advantage is clear. World-class clinica

What do my Ford Bronco and my Urwerk 110 Torpedo watch have in common? I love them both equally. Both have delivered exceptional experiences for me over time, and in doing so exposed just how undifferentiated most brands truly are. My Urwerk is part of my watch collection, but what stays with me most is not just the piece itself. It’s time spent in Geneva. Being in the atelier. Seeing how radically different Urwerk thinks about time, engineering, design and form. The satellit

The smartest study those luxury businesses that serve the most demanding customers in the world. After completing hundreds of engagements in this space, here is what any company can learn from these businesses about driving success. Companies that are winning in the UHNW space aren't winning because of aesthetics or excess. This small specific group of companies succeed because they execute with discipline and refuse to negotiate standards under pressure, allow complacency, o

They lost a billionaire client, and for months they believed the engagement had been a success. This lesson should scare every industry delivering to UHNW. This was one of Europe’s most respected medical wellness clinics, set in the Swiss Alps and known globally for world-class medicine paired with five-star service and hospitality. The client arrived the same way these clients always do, through referrals from his inner circle, where reputation is everything. He flew in by p

One of the most under-utilized, under-leveraged dimensions of luxury is also one of the greatest sources of staggering wasted upside. The pre and post experience. And no, I am not talking about a handwritten note, a polished personalized email, a call from the sales associate, or a polite “check in.” Those are baseline service. They do not move value. They do not deepen loyalty. They do not compound brand equity. But most brands consider that their pre/post experience. What I

When she later called to invite me into the research for her new book, specifically to contribute applied experience insights, I didn’t hesitate for a second. Experiences succeed or fail based on whether people fall into rhythm with them. Why We Sync, which launched yesterday, examines that science with clarity and precision. Kate is not new to shaping how we think. Her first book is now required reading in many university courses, translated into 32 languages, and her work a

China is the opportunity. Gen Z is the inflection point. And this is where The Macallan underplays its hand. From the perspective of a firm that designs experiences for the world’s most exacting brands, and as a whisky fan myself, I read the report on The Macallan’s recent China activation with interest. Then disappointment. While many markets are seeing declines in drinking overall, the opportunity for luxury spirits in China is not just intact, it is accelerating, particula

That assumption is quietly killing differentiation in wellness and specialty medicine. Over the last 12 months, we have worked inside elite concierge medicine, plastic surgery, fertility, regenerative, and advanced specialty practices across major U.S. markets, Dubai, and Seoul. The most consistent failure is not clinical, operational, or even cultural. It is experiential misalignment. What we are seeing go wrong, repeatedly: 🔹 Experience is being imported, not engineered Ma

So many UHNW conversations feel identical right now and so many luxury responses feel so late. The homogeneity is suffocating. I see it every day: repackaged “storytelling” and manufactured theater, hubris dressed up as vision, followed by customer loss and weak market returns. Then everyone sits in a room to figure out what happened. It’s not because brands don’t understand wealth. It’s because they misunderstand saturation. When you operate at permanent access, novelty coll

Last week, I spent time inside a UUHNW private club that required a signed confidentiality agreement to enter. No video. No voice recording. No photography. No exceptions. Even the architecture was built for discretion, with both a main and private entrance. What struck me was not the policy. It was the absence. No phones. Not face down. Not half-hidden. Not checked between courses. Unseen for hours. I had not been in a truly phone-free environment in a long time, and the eff