We don’t fall in love with products or services. We fall in love with how they make us feel.
In a reality where features are copied overnight and price wars race to the bottom, the only thing that truly sticks is the feeling a brand leaves behind. It’s the experience that sets brands apart.
We found that in APAC, 70% agree that the way a brand treats them matters more than what it sells. A further, 82% says that the best brand experiences make them feel something, not just solve a problem.
As people move fluidly between platforms, categories and markets, their expectations come with them. A frictionless checkout on one app becomes the baseline for another. A streaming service that nails personalisation raises the bar for every other brand.
Consumer expectations are no longer confined to one sector, category, geography or even generation.
Younger generations are having an increasing and outsized influence in shaping expectations across ages. In particular, Gen Alpha are rewriting the rules of customer experience. Raised on real-time recommendations, interactive content and instant gratification, they’re not just digital natives, they’re experience natives. Their lens is redefining what good experiences look like for everyone.
In this report, we use Gen Alpha as a lens to decode the future of customer experience. We’ll unpack what defines this generation and how this is reshaping customer experience today.
Methodology
As an overarching framework, we used our ‘NOW – WOW – HOW’ approach, a simple but powerful way to move from scanning the horizon to creating tangible experience concepts brands can act on.
Now
See beyond the here and now by levering existing data through AI
We tapped into existing research, books, papers, social listening data and trend reports (such as our 2025 What Matters report) to create a foundation of knowledge.
Wow
Understand what will wow through groundbreaking human insights
We ran a quantitative survey with 4200 people in 7 markets (Australia, China, Hong Kong, Philippines, Singapore, UK and US) and tapped into our proprietary consumer community, called 'The Collective' with people from the UK and the US.
How
Inspire the how by creating marketing outcomes with impact
Using sacrificial concepts and vibe coding we made the experiences codes come to life through dynamic concepts and prototypes.