This article was based on the interview with Lou Carbone on a new understanding of brand by Greg Kihlström, Marketing and AI Adoption keynote speaker for The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. Listen to the original episode here:
As marketing leaders, we’ve operated for years under a new-ish paradigm: a brand is no longer what a company says it is, but the sum total of every experience a customer has. We nod in agreement in boardrooms, we build journey maps, and we arm our teams with an alphabet soup of metrics—NPS, CSAT, CES—to prove our customer-centricity. We’ve accepted the premise, but if we’re being honest with ourselves, have our organizational structures and mindsets truly kept pace? Most of us are still operating within the rigid silos of an industrial-age framework, bolting on “customer experience” as a department rather than weaving it into the very fabric of the enterprise.
This isn’t just a semantic issue; it’s a fundamental strategic flaw. Lou Carbone, a true pioneer in the field who held the title of Chief Experience Officer before most of us had even heard the term, argues that the industry has taken a wrong turn. For four decades, he has advocated for a deeper, more scientific approach to experience, one rooted in understanding unconscious human needs and engineering emotional outcomes. His perspective isn’t a gentle course correction; it’s a call for a complete reformation. A call to unlearn the comfortable habits of process optimization and metric-chasing, and to embrace the far more challenging—and valuable—work of building genuine brand ethos by managing the clues that create lasting memories.
The Industrial Age Hangover
The single greatest barrier to creating a truly experience-led brand isn’t a lack of data or technology. It’s the persistent, industrial-age mindset that still governs most organizations. We think in terms of departments, processes, and defects. We map a “journey” as a linear process to be optimized, rather than a fluid, emotional continuum in the customer’s mind. Carbone argues that this focus on functional efficiency is a race to commoditization. The real work, the work that builds an iconic brand, happens at a much deeper, more human level.
“It is so huge. It’s moving out of the industrial age and understanding that in the industrial age we created silos, we created the idea that we control the brand… and it’s really consumers who do. We’re not making a product. What we’re doing when we create an experience, which is what a brand is all about, the currency of experience is memories.”
This is a critical distinction for any leader. Are we in the business of eliminating defects or creating distinctive value? While the former is necessary, focusing solely on it means you’re aiming for the floor, not the ceiling. The currency of experience, as Carbone puts it, isn’t a smooth transaction; it’s a positive memory. And memories are not forged from process efficiency alone. They are the result of understanding the unconscious needs of a customer and intentionally embedding sensory and emotional “clues” into every interaction. This requires moving beyond what customers think—the domain of traditional surveys—to how they think, a far more complex and insightful endeavor that delves into the maze of the human mind.
The Corruption of Measurement and the Dreaded “S” Word
In our data-driven world, the pressure to prove ROI is immense. The C-suite demands numbers, and the customer experience profession has responded with a plethora of scoring systems. Yet, this obsession with measurement has, ironically, become one of the biggest impediments to creating great experiences. The focus has shifted from generating positive outcomes to generating positive scores, and the two are not the same thing.
“The worst thing that could’ve happened was putting an S on there. It’s an S word. It’s score. Who gives a damn about a score? It’s does it ring the damn cash register? And it doesn’t. And people are so obsessed with the score because it’s justification, and then they complain that there was no return on the investment. Are we crazy?”
Carbone’s point is refreshingly blunt. When the score becomes the objective, we begin to manage the number instead of the experience. We’ve all seen it: the call center agent who, after solving a problem, pleads for a “10” on the follow-up survey because their bonus depends on it. This act of “pandering the score” immediately corrupts the data and cheapens the interaction. It turns a moment of genuine connection into a transaction for a metric. Carbone colorfully describes this as “inhaling exhaust fumes,” a profession slowly poisoning itself with the carbon monoxide of self-justifying metrics. The true measure of a great experience isn’t a customer’s stated intention to recommend you; it’s whether they actually do, whether they come back, and whether they are more forgiving when you inevitably make a mistake. The cash register, ultimately, is a far more honest arbiter of success than any survey score.
Building an Emotional Ethos: The Barbershop and the Bad Haircut
If functional perfection and high survey scores aren’t the goal, what is? Carbone’s work points to the creation of “brand ethos”—that intangible feeling that a company is more than just a provider of goods or services; it’s an institution whose absence would be genuinely mourned. This ethos is built not on flawless execution, but on emotional resonance. It’s about how you make a customer feel about themselves. He illustrates this with a personal story that beautifully dismantles the conventional wisdom of customer satisfaction.
“An example that I use is a barbershop that I love, that gave me a horrible haircut the first time I went there. But I go back there again and again and again. It’s called Truffitt & Hill, and it’s how they made me feel. They gave me tea. They shined my shoes… And when I left, I was transformed. I felt like a phenomenal person because every clue, every element was how I would feel.”
This story is a masterclass for any marketing leader. The core functional offering—the haircut—was a failure. By any traditional metric, this was a negative experience. Yet, the cumulative effect of the other “experience clues” was so powerful that it created an unshakable emotional bond. He didn’t just get a service; he felt transformed. This is the essence of building brand ethos. It recognizes that customers are far more forgiving of functional slip-ups when there is a deep well of emotional goodwill. The challenge for us is to identify what transforms our customers, to orchestrate the clues that make them feel seen, valued, and elevated, and to understand that sometimes, the things that happen around the core product are more important than the product itself.
AI as a Central Nervous System, Not a Bolt-On
No conversation about the future of customer experience is complete without touching on AI. But here, too, Carbone warns against the prevailing industrial-age thinking. Too many organizations are treating AI as another tool to be bolted onto existing, broken processes—a smarter chatbot, a more efficient email-sorting algorithm. This tactical approach misses the revolutionary potential of the technology entirely.
“AI is a science also in terms of prompts, and it isn’t an add-on. It needs to be central to an operating system that is human, which is the ability to engineer experiences.”
The future isn’t about simply applying AI; it’s about fusing the science of AI with the science of human dynamics. AI should be the central nervous system of an adaptive, customer-driven enterprise. It should power a system designed from the ground up to understand and respond to the three levels of customer desire: basic human needs, cultural differences, and finally, true individualization. To get there, we must stop seeing AI as a way to do the same old things faster and instead see it as the engine for a new, human-centric operating model. This requires systems thinking and a willingness to redesign the organization around the customer, with AI as the intelligent core.
In many ways, the path the customer experience industry has taken is the path of least resistance. It’s easier to create a process map than to decode unconscious thought. It’s more comfortable to report on a Net Promoter Score than to orchestrate the hundreds of subtle clues that create a feeling. But as Carbone passionately argues, this easy path leads to a dead end of commoditization and metric-chasing. The work that he and his colleagues began decades ago pointed toward a different direction, a more challenging but ultimately more rewarding journey.
This is the reformation he calls for: a return to first principles. It requires us to be curious researchers, not just process managers. It demands that we become architects of emotion, not just analysts of data. It asks us to have the courage to tell our leadership that the comfortable scores they’ve grown to love are a distraction from the real work of building a brand that matters. It’s an invitation to take the road less traveled—one that requires unlearning, discovery, and a deep, abiding respect for the complexity of the human beings we call customers. For the leaders willing to embark on that journey, the reward isn’t just a better score; it’s a brand that lasts.
