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WHAT'S NEW IN THE WORLD OF EXPERIENCE
A collection of posts from our founder on all things experiential
Customer Experience
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
“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
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
Something every luxury brand needs to hear.
Last night, over dinner in Portofino, an UHNW guest of our client netted out something every luxury brand needs to hear. I asked him what keeps him returning so consistently to this brand every quarter, year after year. He replied, "Aside from the quality, they have helped me develop my life over the years in ways I didn't expect, and they treat me with such care that feels like family - only more loyal, with more wisdom, and better taste." He spends millions annually with th
The AHA Group
Aug 182 min read
I knew exactly what had gone wrong with this luxury brand.
Somewhere in a conference room months earlier, someone had written, "We need to create more memorable moments." I could see the evidence everywhere. Here's the problem: affluent and ultra-high-net-worth clients have already moved on. Like way on. What feels extraordinary to an organization often feels remarkably familiar to someone who experiences the world's best brands every week. The objective isn’t to design specific moments. It’s to design brand DNA into everything. Ever
The AHA Group
Aug 182 min read
The most powerful expressions of a luxury brand don't happen in stores
They happen in stories. In our work with Rolex, the challenge was never creating meaning. Rolex already possesses extraordinary meaning. The challenge was translating that meaning into something people could physically experience. Into signatures, rituals, environments, and moments that allow the customer to move from observer to participant. This is why the new Rolex boutique located on a mountain top in the Swiss Alps is so compelling. Most brands still think about physical
The AHA Group
Aug 182 min read
This Is the Dangerous Trap Making Businesses Bland, Forgettable and Easy to Ignore
I attended three events last week hosted by three different luxury brands. By the end, I could have covered the logos and struggled to tell you which brand hosted which event. This epidemic of sameness runs through luxury retail, private clubs, wealth management, hotels, and countless other industries. Most leaders cannot see the degree to which they have homogenized their offerings. Take private aviation. Most private aviation companies have hired an "experience leader" from
The AHA Group
Aug 181 min read
I see 200-300 handwritten notes a year. 99% of them miss the mark.
I see 200-300 handwritten notes a year. 99% of them miss the mark and, frankly, make me think less of the person who sent them. I've received them from airline executives, hotel general managers, cruise line officers, luxury retail associates, auto dealers, private bankers, and advisors. The industry changes, but the mistakes never do. And everything on this list makes me think less of the brand and the leadership behind it: 🔹 The note was written by someone's admin. Sorry,
The AHA Group
Aug 182 min read
Luxury clienteling is one of the worst experiences in luxury retail.
200 of the world's most valuable luxury retail clients spoke to us about this topic. 65 percent of wealthy, high-net-worth, high-spending luxury consumers report dissatisfaction with the retail in-store and digital experience. 85 percent say the overall luxury client experience has declined. The brands reading top-tier client concentration as loyalty are misreading a warning sign as a report card. Those clients aren't more loyal. They're just the last ones left while everyone
The AHA Group
Aug 182 min read
White Paper: The Consent Collapse
In over 200 conversations with HNW and UHNW clients, they have shared views about retail luxury brands they would never say publicly. Not because they are angry. Because they are done. What is striking is not the dissatisfaction itself. It is the language increasingly being used to describe modern luxury relationship models. Clients describing “VIP relationships” as psychologically exhausting. Clienteling as surveillance. Familiarity as entitlement. Personalization as pressur
The AHA Group
Aug 182 min read
I’ve been in 8 private clubs in the past two weeks.
Very few people experience this particular category of luxury in that kind of concentration. The cumulative effect is powerful. It’s rare to get to see these types of clubs back-to-back, but there are lessons for everyone in my read-out for our client. These are all clubs that have opened in the past two years, and I was fortunate to accompany several HNW / UHNW members on visits as their guest. I’ll net it out: the gap between perceived differentiation and actual differentia
The AHA Group
Aug 182 min read
"The Wow Trap" Article
The luxury industry is still pouring money into “Wow Moments.” The data says it’s a terrible investment. Even more so for HNW and UHNW clients. Gartner found that delighting customers with one singular Wow Moment has surprisingly low impact on retention, despite the significantly higher operational cost. But the most damning statistic may be this: 98% of companies invest in delight programs that drive only 2% of total brand loyalty. The remaining 98% of brand loyalty is drive
The AHA Group
May 252 min read
The "What" versus The "How"
My morning routine is pretty consistent. After my first coffee (absolutely essential, non-negotiable) I normally take about fifteen minutes to sketch out my LinkedIn post for the day. I’ve been thinking about writing this post for some time. As I scroll through my LinkedIn feed, it strikes me that 90% of the content I see could be characterized as “What”. In my world of luxury and ultra-luxury, there is a diverse range of thought leadership around the problems facing luxury t
The AHA Group
May 252 min read
HNW/UHNW consumers are becoming extraordinarily fast evaluators
Last week, I spent time with a client discussing something I think about often: high-end consumers are becoming extraordinarily fast evaluators. Not necessarily harsher, but faster. Someone may have stayed at Aman in Tokyo, visited a private members club in London, and had a remarkable experience at Cartier, all before interacting with your organization that same month. Those experiences shape expectations more than most companies realize. This has come up recently in worksho
The AHA Group
May 252 min read
The Players Changed. The Industry Hasn't.
“Tradition deserves to be preserved. But too many golf clubs use tradition as an excuse to avoid evolution.” That came from an interview this week with a club member for one of our consulting projects. He continued: “I play golf all over the world and belong to three clubs. The courses are world-class. Much of the experience around them still feels decades behind the clientele they serve.” That observation is more important than the industry realizes. Golf may be one of the c
The AHA Group
May 152 min read
One Thing That Should Terrify Luxury Brands
I regularly talk with millionaires and billionaires as part of our client engagements and here’s one thing I hear time and again that should terrify most luxury brands. Ultra-high net worth (UHNW) individuals - founders, family office principals, business magnates – are changing their relationship with luxury. They are emotionally disengaging. They are no longer impressed. Many are actively bored. We heard the same sentiment repeatedly, “Every luxury experience today feels
The AHA Group
May 152 min read
Luxury brands are making a dangerous miscalculation
Luxury brands are making a dangerous miscalculation: they believe they are far more differentiated than they actually are. I was speaking recently with the GM of a luxury hotel who proudly described their Baccarat chandeliers. Around the same time, the Captain of a luxury yacht walked me through their mid-deck meditation garden. The problem is not that these things are unimpressive. The problem is that nearly every serious competitor now has their own version of the same form
The AHA Group
May 152 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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