Disconnection between customer experience and brand is killing organisations.

For a significant portion of the past decade, customer experience has been signalled as a silver bullet for organisations. A resolution for ailing shareholder value and Net Promoter Score, endorsed by market data — experience-led companies outperformed the S&P 500, 22% of Fortune 100 companies have C-suite customer officers compared to 6% of the Fortune 1000, 81% of marketers told they competed mostly or completely on the basis of customer experience.

More compelling still is the narrative of so-named legacy companies which successfully transformed. Domino’s Pizza is one of the best examples. In 2007, Domino’s was the first company of its kind to introduce online ordering. In 2008, online order tracking was launched. In 2010, J. Patrick Doyle joined as CEO and led an 8-year run of experience innovation including voice ordering in 2014, a loyalty programme in 2015 and launch of the ‘AnyWare’ platform in 2016 which enabled orders from Twitter, Facebook Messenger, smart watches and smart TV’s. A modern-day commitment to the path of least effort which has been part of Domino’s DNA since their 1973 innovation of the ’30 minute guarantee.’

The result saw a 9000% increase in share price — from $3 in 2008 to north of $270 earlier this year — alongside a doubling of market share and 30 straight quarters of growth. Doyle’s tenure is a case study of the disproportionate returns of digital transformation.

In the 2020’s, we may find ourselves in a prison of our own design.

Today, progressive C-suite need ask if the approach prompted by analysts and legacy success is still the silver bullet, or one that has the potential to turn dangerously myopic.

In 2019, a Forrester report titled ‘The Cost of Losing Creativity’ — a survey of 100,000 customers and 300 major brands — stated “customer experience has become homogenised, technology is now table stakes as customers can no longer distinguish one experience from another … every CMO at every company feels mounting pressure to differentiate their brand now that their go-to playbook for performance…