Customer Experience

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

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

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

“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

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

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

This UHNW misunderstanding is costing luxury and ultra-luxury brands. Luxury brands are misunderstanding one of the most important behavioral traits at the highest levels of wealth. As wealth increases, the desire to visibly belong often decreases. Despite spending enormous amounts of time and money studying high-net worth consumers, luxury brands misunderstand this constantly. Aspirational affluent, emerging affluent, and emerging millionaire consumers are highly open to tas

We surveyed over 100 luxury boutique hotels, 90% failed our standard in this one area. The shift happening with luxury boutique hotels is undeniable: travelers are trading scaled predictability for individuality, design, and a sense of place. Demand is not the question. For any market, the pattern traditionally follows four stages: 🔹 The opportunity is Unseen. (below the radar) 🔹 The opportunity is Unlocked. (capital moves in) 🔹 The offering is Engineered. (assets are acqu

Let me tell you what "be experiential" actually means in practice: nothing. It means absolutely nothing. It is a sentence that sounds like strategy and requires nothing of the person saying it. The same goes for "create emotional connection" and "personalize every touchpoint." These statements have occupied every conference stage, every strategy deck, and every LinkedIn feed for thirty years. The vocabulary has not changed and neither has the outcome, because execution is a f

"When you buy a luxury product or book a luxury voyage or trip, who handles the wait best, and who handles it worst?” The answer impacts revenue. We have interviewed hundreds of luxury yacht, cruise, aviation, and hospitality guests at the top of the market over the last 12 months. Much of this commentary came during projects in other luxury sectors, but the answers to that question were telling. Worst: branded yacht, luxury cruise, aviation, and luxury hospitality. Consisten

Almost none strive to be indispensable. That distinction is now defining. Those are not versions of the same thing. Memorable is an outcome. Necessary is architecture. The reason almost no luxury brand has built for necessity is that the industry defined itself, from the beginning, as the opposite of essential. That self-concept is now a competitive liability. Indispensable is the new competitive moat. A client who loved the experience will come back. Until something better a

The wealthiest demographic in the world is growing faster than anyone predicted. Millionaires and billionaires now number over 41 million globally and that population is projected to grow another 31% by 2030. And the harder it gets to win in this space, the more organizations fall back on the one thing that guarantees they won't: treating it like a homogenous segment. UHNW and HNW are not segments. They are financial thresholds that tell you almost nothing about how a person

I wrote this piece after joining one of the world’s most exclusive private clubs and experiencing, firsthand, the gap I see across ultra-luxury brands every day: extraordinary assets, serious standards, global prestige, and a human experience that does not fully carry the weight of what was built. Do not mistake this for just a private club story. It applies to ultra-luxury hospitality, wealth management, branded residences, private aviation, luxury retail, concierge healthca

The satisfaction scores were outstanding, yet the $18 million luxury home project told a very different story. I'm sitting across from the CEO of one of the most respected high-end custom builders in the United States. Luxury homes starting at $4.5 million. Fully bespoke. Every detail considered. He walks me through everything his organization has built. His teams have read Unreasonable Hospitality and Fandom. They've been through Disney Institute training. Survey scores sit

Seventy. Seven. Zero. The number of fellow billionaires your client will personally brief, for or against you, before you ever know it happened. And that conversation is already taking place in a room you will never be in. The luxury industry's response to one of the most consequential referral networks on earth? Confidence that they've already figured it out. Most brands will point to their butler service. Their bespoke concierge catering to their every desire. Their persona

A private wealth client told me recently that their family has had the same travel advisor for fourteen years. JPMorgan just acquired a luxury travel firm to try to compete with her. The Wall Street Journal ran it as a strategy story. We read it as a warning. We just published a case study on our experience architecture work inside private wealth management. We know this space from the inside. Here is what is actually happening. The Great Wealth Transfer is moving $100 trilli

Last week, our firm was covered in Morningstar for our record year. Last year, we completed 87 consulting projects across four global offices with 45 professionals, and 60% of our revenue coming outside North America. We were named a Top 10 CX Consulting Firm in the US and Corporate LiveWire's Business Transformation Consultancy of the Year for the second consecutive year. And that is only the consulting business. It does not include our speaking, workshops, ICON Diagnostic (

WSJ is reporting that hotel brands are rushing into the private members club business. Fascinating. And telling. Here is the problem. Luxury hotels already have a sameness problem that most haven't solved. Walk through most five-star properties globally and you will find the same aesthetic, the same programming, the same choices, with a handful of rare exceptions. Now those same brands want to run clubs. Operating a club is not operating a hotel. Different drivers, metrics, a

The boardroom was full of smart, earnest people who genuinely believed they were delivering a world-class experience. Forbes Stars on the wall. Michelin Keys on the website. Standing ovations at the conference the week before. For most organizations, that is the destination. They were not wrong that they were good. They were wrong that good was enough. The client data I walked them through that morning told a different story. Not a dramatic one. A precise one. What their gues

“I’ve watched owner behavior in luxury branded residences for over two decades. The shift in the last twelve months is notable”, a CEO shared with me in a recent meeting. He wasn’t describing market softness. He was describing something more precise and more actionable. Today, a signed contract is now the beginning of the evaluation; it is no longer the end of it. Most luxury developers still think a sell-out is the finish line. At the UHNW level, it’s now the starting gun