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Our Perspective

What this means for leaders navigating growth, change or transformation in their organisation.

The Real Loyalty Engine

Loyalty isn’t earned by more features or deeper discounts; it’s built when customers feel seen, supported and valued at the moments that matter. The evidence is hard to ignore: Harvard Business Review points to research showing that emotional connections can lift customer loyalty by about 37%. Seen through a commercial lens, that’s not sentimentality — it’s risk mitigation and growth protection. When organisations neglect the emotional arc of the journey, price sensitivity rises, repeat behaviour weakens and planning confidence slips. When they design for feeling, effort falls, attachment grows and margins defend themselves.

Make Emotion Operational

The unlock is choosing the emotion your brand wants to be responsible for — confidence, momentum, relief — and wiring it into how teams build, ship and serve. Most organisations we work with underestimate how operational this is; it’s less slogan, more system.

Design four “signature moments” so the intended feeling shows up without fail:

• First use: deliver a quick win and a human cue.
• Handover: carry context across channels, no resets.
• Recovery: own the issue, resolve fast, leave dignity intact.
• Renewal: reflect progress achieved, set a clear next chapter.

Measure The Feeling

Feelings are measurable if you pick the right proxies and treat them as leading indicators. Pair traditional metrics with behavioural signals that reveal whether your intended emotion is landing.

Track a simple set that travels across functions:

• Repeat rate alongside average discount given to test price resilience.
• Time-to-first-value and first-contact resolution to quantify eased effort.
• Verbatim feedback coded for the target emotion, not just satisfaction.
• Drop-off at handovers to expose context gaps that erode trust.

Leadership Trade-Offs

Committing to an emotion means trade-offs. It asks leaders to clarify non-negotiables, simplify options that confuse, and prioritise the few moments where feeling does the heavy lifting. It also asks finance to recognise that fixing friction is not a cost centre but revenue insurance, especially when the alternative is a steady drift toward commoditisation.

Governance matters. Create decision rights that protect the emotional standard under pressure — launches, incidents, quarter-end targets. When product, service and marketing share the same emotional brief, teams know what to amplify and what to cut, which shortens time to value and reduces support demand.

The Compounding Effect

Get this right and you don’t just reduce churn; you build an affinity that compounds. Price pressure eases, referrals rise and forecasting steadies because the relationship itself carries weight. Emotional clarity, consistently delivered, becomes an operating advantage that competitors struggle to copy — and over time, it’s the quiet engine behind more predictable growth.

Sources:

1. Cultivating Emotional Ties to Drive Value and Growth
2. Measuring Emotional Connection on the Path to Loyalty
3. Sustainability Proof Points that Drive Loyalty and Trust