Are you an ? This training is worth 2 Continuing Education Units (CEUs) to maintain your PCM®️ certification.

Meet Your Instructor

Abdul Suleiman

Chief Experience Officer of UX 4Sight

Abdul Suleiman is the Chief Experience Officer of UX 4Sight, a digital user experience (UX) agency specializing in making websites and software applications more intuitive, engaging and profitable. For the last 20 years, he has helped over 40 Fortune 500 companies, including AT&T, Citi and Merck, strategically gather, analyze and apply evidence-based user research to make informed user-centered design decisions.

As an Adjunct Professor, Abdul has taught in DePaul University’s graduate UX programs and for ten other universities. He has also taught over 330 UX best practices courses across 12 different course titles for companies like Disney, Capital One, Visa and Intuit. Abdul holds a Master of Science in Information from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His degree specialization encompasses User Experience and MBA coursework. He received his BA with honors from Loyola University Chicago.

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Are you an ? This training is worth 1 Continuing Education Units (CEUs) to maintain your PCM®️ certification.

Meet Your Instructor

Abdul Suleiman

Chief Experience Officer of UX 4Sight

Abdul Suleiman is the Chief Experience Officer of UX 4Sight, a digital user experience (UX) agency specializing in making websites and software applications more intuitive, engaging and profitable. For the last 20 years, he has helped over 40 Fortune 500 companies, including AT&T, Citi and Merck, strategically gather, analyze and apply evidence-based user research to make informed user-centered design decisions.

As an Adjunct Professor, Abdul has taught in DePaul University’s graduate UX programs and for ten other universities. He has also taught over 330 UX best practices courses across 12 different course titles for companies like Disney, Capital One, Visa and Intuit. Abdul holds a Master of Science in Information from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His degree specialization encompasses User Experience and MBA coursework. He received his BA with honors from Loyola University Chicago.

��������� Members Get the Best Pricing

Not only do members get discounts on training like this, but they also receive exclusive content, downloadable tools, unlimited access to ��������� Journals, membership in networking communities and more.

Join & SAVE

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The resource reframes inclusive design not as a niche or compliance-driven activity, but as a strategic marketing orientation that improves consumer well-being, expands markets, and enhances firm outcomes. The deck is deliberately structured to move instructors and students from why inclusive design matters, to how inclusive design works, to what it looks like in practice across industries.

This resource functions as (1) a starter kit for instructors new to inclusive design, (2) a modular teaching tool for experienced faculty, and (3) a bridge between research, practice, and pedagogy.

Brief Descriptions of the Contents of the Resource

I. Why Teach Inclusive Design in Marketing and Business?

The opening section establishes the pedagogical motivation for inclusive design. It critiques the traditional marketing focus on the “average” or “mainstream” consumer and demonstrates how this default approach systematically excludes marginalized and underrepresented groups

II. Core Principles of Inclusive Design

The next section introduces a clear, three-principle definition of inclusive design, making the concept accessible and teachable:

1. Design with the extreme user in mind
   Students learn that inclusive design begins by recognizing exclusion and starting from the margins rather than the mean.
2. Focus on facilitating a match
   Emphasis is placed on the fit between users, products, environments, and usage contexts—not just product features.
3. Benefit a more diverse consumer base
   The “curb-cut effect” illustrates how designing for those at the margins often improves experiences for everyone.

III. Marketplace Mismatches and Consumer Experience

A central conceptual contribution of the deck is the marketplace mismatch framework, which explains how exclusion arises when consumer abilities and marketplace design are misaligned.

Students are introduced to four types of mismatches:

• Sensory (seeing, hearing, touching)
• Cognitive (processing and understanding information)
• Behavioral (performing required actions)
• Social (feeling respected, seen, and included)

IV. Frameworks for Teaching and Application

Several teaching-friendly frameworks are introduced to help students diagnose and design for inclusion.

• ADDRESSING framework: Encourages students to ask, “Who are we unintentionally excluding?” across dimensions such as age, disability, religion, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, and national origin.
• DARE framework: Guides students through how consumers appraise inclusive (or exclusionary) design cues and how those appraisals shape emotions and behavior.
• Levels of inclusive design: Distinguishes between providing access, enabling engaged participation, and empowering success.
• MISMATCH framework: See above.

V. Pedagogical Guidance and Classroom Use

The deck provides instructors with teaching suggestions, including:

• How to sequence concepts across a class session or module
• Buzz-group discussions on barriers to inclusive design
• Experiential redesign exercises (e.g., redesigning everyday products for different user groups)
• Role-taking and perspective-taking exercises
• Integration of short videos and TED talks

VI. The 25 Mini Case Studies: Learning Through Practice

The heart of the flipping book is 25 concise mini case studies, designed to be discussed individually or comparatively. Each case highlights:

• A specific form of exclusion
• The resulting consumer–marketplace mismatch
• A concrete inclusive design solution
• Broader implications for firms and society

Case categories include:

• Consumer products (durables; e.g., footwear, appliances, furniture, backpacks)
• Inclusive services (e.g., financial services, hospitality, retail, theme parks)
• Consumer products (nondurables; e.g., beauty, personal care, grooming)
• Technology (e.g., gaming, navigation tools)
• Inclusive tourism (5 bonus cases; e.g., airlines, adventure parks, public spaces, social enterprises)

VII. Inclusive Tourism as a Special Topic

This section introduces:

• Inclusive tourism principles
• Marginalized groups as consumers and producers
• Examples of firms and destinations redesigning experiences, not just infrastructure

VIII. Additional Resources for Deepening Learning

The closing section curates:

• Academic and practitioner articles
• Managerial readings
• Talks and videos
• A carefully selected list of novels, memoirs, and nonfiction books to build empathy and perspective-taking

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In the software industry, we hear a lot about “legacy systems,” often in reference to outdated platforms and processes that have been grandfathered in and can’t really handle modern software needs. The concept of legacy systems exists in the consumer marketplace as well, and the way brands interact with their audiences. By extension, the way the market research industry functions is part of an outdated algorithm.

As an industry, market research has spent the better part of the past few decades exploring brand loyalty—often from a narcissistic viewpoint. Surveys have been filled with questions asking about awareness, familiarity and consideration. But these are navel-gazing, narcissistic questions. “Have you heard of me?” “How much do you know about me?” “Do you like me?” 

While tweaks have been made along the way to at least try to keep up with changing consumer behavior, smart researchers know that the way consumers are interacting with brands is increasingly complex, and depends on a whole host of contextual circumstances. Consumer insights need to evolve as well, but we find ourselves in a straightjacket consisting of a legacy system based on loyalty research.

Breaking Free From Outdated Methodology

If the past year has done nothing else, it has shaken our “norms” to the core. Traditional ways of doing things have come into question—from the way schools are structured to the way we shop and from the way we work (both as employees and leaders) to what we prioritize in our daily lives. Things are speeding up, digitalization is touching every aspect of life and uncertainty has become the status quo. Market research is already responding to these transformations, catapulting its evolution to better meet the insights needs of today.

However, like all transitions, this one has been nothing if not messy. It lacks the tried-and-true framework of the past, on which we could fall back for guidance and comfort when it came to our consumer insights efforts. And the truth is, there is no new framework to which we can turn. If we examine the shopper journey alone, it has transitioned from a linear path to purchase, to one that is anything but linear, to one that can’t be seen as any kind of path at all. In fact, even the word “journey” itself no longer feels applicable. Individuals are making decisions from places that are intensely unique—with unpredictable influences and a vast number of contextual circumstances at play. One of the least of these influences hinges on brand loyalty, something which multiple studies have shown is very low on the list (if on the list at all) of the decision-making process.

Market research must adapt. Extracting better insights means moving away from the kind of “brand narcissism” that leads to surveys full of questions about the brand that are disconnected from customers and their experiences. There are a few tangible things researchers and marketers can do to better understand their audience’s motivations.

Traditional research models focused on brand perception and loyalty metrics are too restrictive to explore the essential “why” driving consumer behavior. Evolving your market research and consumer insights strategies to encompass the true decision-making process will help optimize your offerings to fit the mindset of today’s customer. 

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Measuring the success of design can feel like two radically different, but not mutually exclusive, experiences. On one hand, it can feel a bit like sorcery: mysterious, risky and totally unpredictable. At the same time, it can feel like a widget assembly line: calculated, dull and safe, often with little reward. In many organizations, this cycle can hinder breakthrough thinking and innovation. 

To make effective decisions, we need to balance the chaos with the predictable by finding ways to inspire great work and mitigate risk. So how do we harness and measure the power of design, without snuffing out the “magic” that makes breakthrough ideas take hold? How do we effectively lead innovation into the future, without taking a blind leap?

Building in Confidence: Lead and Lag Thinking

The answer lies in the balance of leading and lagging indicators, and in knowing what each can do to unleash more powerful design solutions. Weaving the right balance of inspiration, intelligence and validation into the design process creates outcomes that are efficient and prolific. 

Leading indicators help us understand the consumer, category and culture. This kind of insight work acts as a compass—it enables design teams to navigate the challenge and keeps them pointed true north. If we are missing meaningful, timely and actionable insights in any of these areas, we need to examine how our business strategy can be realized with an incomplete picture. Brands can’t thrive in a vacuum of consumer, category or cultural context, and design starved of meaningful inspiration will, more often than not, fall flat. 

Lagging indicators help us to validate the well-informed hypotheses we have asserted in our design work. If the leading indicators are robust, this validation is a pleasure to experience, because the work hits both strategic and executional bullseyes. Learning can then be focused on optimization of what we already know, instead of holding our breath to find out things we should have known before we began.

Leading Indicators: Identify and Focus the Challenge

Consumers can’t tell us what the future looks like, but they can tell us what their lives look like, and how we fit into it (or don’t). Early ethnography or other qualitative insights work goes beyond demographic realities: Their unique worldview creates a powerful lens through which we can inspire and motivate. It helps us understand and tap into their ever-evolving needs and barriers more meaningfully. If you haven’t refreshed your segmentation or consumer target intelligence in 18-24 months, you’re overdue to hear from them. Consumer insight work doesn’t have to be expensive or time-consuming—neither is it a zero-sum game. If budget is tight, scaling your insights approach can target gaps in your intelligence without derailing the job to be done or overspending.

Leading Indicators: Accurately Inspire Effective Work

Category and cultural intelligence is equally important. Without understanding the trends that drive category evolution, the future is difficult to see. Without understanding the emergent visual language that fuels these trends, we won’t be speaking in a language that inspires or responds to consumer needs and desires. 

Design semiotics is a powerful way to uncover this fertile ground, building relevance and longevity into your brand expression. Though the term “semiotics” sounds complex and expensive, it’s actually quite simple. Think of it as a competitive audit of newness. What niche brands are tipping into popular culture? What design trends are they instigating? In regions driving the most innovation, what emergent design language is manifesting? What new meaning spaces can we tap into?

Lagging Indicators: Validate Your Early Decisions

Quantitative or hybrid methodologies can be a great way to validate design decisions, if the work has been informed in a relevant way. When leading intelligence is strong, design strategies become inspired, prolific and inevitable. Testing them quantitatively can feel like a win, and even produce multiple “winners.” The key to great quantitative outcomes is to focus learning objectives on the business strategy that drove the change. Ensure focus on the meaningful and actionable, avoiding subjective “Do you like it?” lines of inquiry or data collection. 

Loyal consumers who observe the change with a little confusion or discomfort is inevitable—the meaningful inquiry lies in what the change means to them, despite their discomfort. If the design resonates with new growth targets and doesn’t cue a tangible negative change with loyals, we have created a successful solution.

Lagging Indicators Can Focus Optimization Quickly

Smart, effective design testing allows for easy optimization of design solutions, because the strategic guardrails on the visual landscape have already been established. With this confidence, feedback from quantitative research becomes highly actionable and clear. 

For example, if we:

then we will know definitively what levers to push or pull to take a design from good to great. Whatever your business strategies are trying to achieve, ensure that you’re customizing your research for success against those specific, focused objectives. If design testing is directing you to go back to the drawing board, you simply haven’t informed the work with enough leading indicators.

Leading: Informing and Inspiring Your Design

Lagging: Validating and Optimizing Your Design

Benefits of Balance

A robust intelligence phase that informs key consumer, category and cultural insight is crucial, and provides the guardrails for effective and inspirational design solutions. It also allows quantitative validation to perform optimally, doing the right job at the right phase in the process. If we allow our teams to solve design problems with all the intelligence they need, with a full and well-rounded toolbox, validation becomes more valuable and more meaningful. It creates a playbook for designers to execute with excellence, early and proactively, instead of reacting to unexpected research results late in the game. 

Working this way builds confidence, consensus and rich intelligence along the way—but most importantly, it creates prolific design outcomes that win. 

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That is, while most existing research addresses CE in particular domestic or local market conditions, the reported findings may lack generalizability in and across international markets, revealing an important research gap. For example, Gupta, Pansari, and Kumar (2018, p. 16) posit that “the positive association between customer experience and satisfaction is enhanced in collectivistic (vs. individualistic) culture[s],” thus revealing important CE-based differences across markets. Similarly, Hollebeek (2018, p. 46) postulates that “consumers displaying mostly individualist (collectivist) traits will focus their cognitive CE more on individual brand interaction attributes (holistic brand interactions) than consumers exhibiting mostly collectivist (individualist) traits,” corroborating the existence of differing cross-cultural CE dynamics.  

Different market environments exhibit unique characteristics in terms of culture, GDP, living standards, regulation, socioeconomic systems, purchase behaviors, and so on (Burgess and Steenkamp 2006), thus differentially shaping cross-market CE. That is, customers’ cross-cultural engagement styles or their “motivationally driven disposition to think, feel, act, and relate to others in a certain manner characteristic of their specific individual  … traits in brand interactions” are likely to differ across markets (Hollebeek 2018, p. 46). Moreover, firms’ CE-cultivating strategies may differ in line with prevailing institutional or infrastructure conditions. For example, Kumar and Pansari (2016) find that economic growth, which they argue will affect consumer budgets, has a positive impact on CE. Furthermore, the lack of trust-enhancing infrastructure and well-functioning regulatory institutions in emerging markets can affect consumer trust and CE (Jaiswal et al. 2018).

Drawing on these observed gaps, in this special issue we call for the further contextualization of CE research across international markets (Tsang and Kwan 1999), which refers to the process of “incorporating the context in describing, understanding, and theorizing about phenomena within it” (Tsui 2006, p. 2). We welcome conceptual, methodological, qualitative, or quantitative contributions that offer insight in this area. Special issue papers may focus on topics including, but not limited to, the following:

• To what extent do existing CE-based findings hold up in or across international marketing contexts?
• How do cross-cultural characteristics affect CE in or across particular market-based scenarios?
• How does customer trust/relational behavior affect cross-market CE (or vice versa; Hewett and Bearden 2001)?  
• Which entry strategies are most conducive in markets characterized by different CE styles (Onamusi 2020)?
• To what extent does culture affect customer-to-customer interactions in international market contexts (e.g., online brand communities, social media; Kim, Moon, and Iaccobucci 2019)?
• How does product/service standardization influence CE in or across particular markets?
• How does different countries’ technological infrastructure and/or usage affect online CE?
• How do consumers engage with particular brands in the company’s home market (vs. particular host markets)?
• (How) does customer ethnocentrism affect CE with local/domestic (vs. foreign-made) products or brands?
• How do multinational corporations (vs. born global companies) develop CE in particular markets?
• Which international market research best practices help advance insight into CE with specific brands, products, or firms in or across particular markets?
• How do differing national characteristics (e.g., literacy rates, technology access, GDP) affect CE across markets?
• What is the role of institutional or other national (e.g., regulatory, political, administrative, knowledge-based, global connectedness) factors or conditions (Berry, Guillen, and Zhou 2010) in firms’ abilities to develop and benefit from CE?
• Which cultural model(s) best explain or predict CE’s development across international markets?
• What are CE’s key cross-border characteristics and dynamics, both during and after COVID-19?
• How has the pandemic affected the use of (smart) technology across international markets, and what is its impact on CE?

All manuscripts must conform to JIM’s author guidelines. Manuscripts must be submitted through the . When submitting your manuscript, please indicate that your submission is to the special issue entitled “Customer Engagement in International Markets.” The closing date for submissions is September 30, 2021. ��

Queries can be directed at the Special Issue Guest Editors: 

Linda D. Hollebeek
Senior Associate Professor/Full Professor of Marketing
Montpellier Business School/Tallinn University of Technology
l.hollebeek@montpellier-bs.com

Wafa Hammedi
Professor of Marketing
University of Namur
wafa.hammedi@unamur.be

Sanjit K. Roy
Associate Professor of Marketing
University of Western Australia
sanjit.roy@uwa.edu.au

Kelly Hewett
Reagan Professor of Business
University of Tennessee
khewett@utk.edu

References

Berry, Heather, Mauro F. Guillén, and Nan Zhou (2010), “An Institutional Approach to Cross-National Distance,” Journal of International Business Studies, 41 (9), 1460–80.

Brodie, Rod, Linda Hollebeek, Ana Ilic, and Biljana Juric (2011), “Customer Engagement: Conceptual Domain, Fundamental Propositions & Implications for Research in Service Marketing,” Journal of Service Research, 14 (3), 252–71.

Burgess, Steven M. and Jan-Benedict E.M. Steenkamp (2006), “Marketing Renaissance: How Research in Emerging Markets Advances Marketing Science and Practice,” International Journal of Research in Marketing, 23 (4), 337–56.

Christofi, Michael, Demetris Vrontis, Erasmia Leonidou, and Alkis Thrassou (2018), “Customer Engagement Through Choice in Cause-Related Marketing: A Potential for Global Competitiveness,” International Marketing Review, 29 (5), 354–66.

Gupta, Shaphali, Anita Pansari, and V. Kumar (2018), “Global Customer Engagement,” Journal of International Marketing, 26 (1), 4–29.

Hewett, Kelly and William O. Bearden (2001), “Dependence, Trust, and Relational Behavior on the Part of Foreign Subsidiary Marketing Operations: Implications for Managing Global Marketing Operations,” Journal of Marketing, 65 (4), 51–66.

Hollebeek, Linda (2018), “Individual-Level Cultural Consumer Engagement Styles: Conceptualization, Propositions, and Implications,” International Marketing Review, 35 (1), 42–71.

Hollebeek, Linda, Rajendra K. Srivastava, and Tom Chen (2019), “S-D Logic-Informed Customer Engagement: Integrative Framework, Revised Fundamental Propositions, and Application to CRM,” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 47 (1), 161–85.

Jaiswal, Anand, Rakesh Niraj, Chang Hee Park, and Manoj K. Agarwal (2018), “The Effect of Relationship and Transactional Characteristics on Customer Retention in Emerging Online Markets,” Journal of Business Research, 92, 25–35

Kim, Moon-Yong, Sangkil Moon, and Dawn Iaccobucci (2019), “The Influence of Global Brand Distribution on Brand Popularity on Social Media,” Journal of International Marketing, 27 (4), 22–38.

Kumar, V. and Anita Pansari (2016) “Competitive Advantage Through Engagement,” Journal of Marketing Research, 53 (4), 497–514.

Kumar, V., Bharath Rajan, Shaphali Gupta, and Ilaria Dalla Pozza (2019), “Customer Engagement in Service,” Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 47 (1), 138–60.

Meire, Matthijs, Kelly Hewett, Michel Ballings, V. Kumar, and Dirk van den Poel (2019), “The Role of Marketer-Generated Content in Customer Engagement Marketing,” Journal of Marketing, 83 (6), 21–42.

Onamusi, Abiodun (2020), “Entry Mode Strategy, Customer Engagement, and Firm Performance,” Journal of Business and Social Review in Emerging Economies, 6 (1), 99–112.

Tsang, Eric and Kai-Man Kwan (1999), “Replication and Theory Development in Organizational Science: A Critical Realist Perspective,” Academy of Management Review, 24 (4), 759–80.

Tsui, Anne S. (2006), “Contextualization in Chinese Management Research,” Management and Organization Review, 2 (1), 1–13.

Special Issue Editor Bios

Linda D. Hollebeek, Ph.D, is Senior Associate Professor of Marketing at Montpellier Business School and Full Professor of Marketing at Tallinn University of Technology (Adj.). Her research centers on customer/consumer engagement and interactive consumer/brand relationships. Her work to date has published in the Journal of Service Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, International Marketing Review, Journal of Interactive Marketing, and Industrial Marketing Management, among others. She is the recipient of the 2020 SERVSIG Emerging Scholar Award, serves as Associate Editor of the European Journal of Marketing, is on the ERB of Psychology & Marketing, and is co-editor of The Handbook of Research on Customer Engagement. She has guest edited recent special issues in the Journal of Service Research (near finalization) and International Journal of Research in Marketing (mostly finalized).

Wafa Hammedi, Ph.D, is Associate Professor of  Service Innovation and Marketing at the University of Namur-Belgium. She received her Ph.D from the Institute for Management Research, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Her primary research interests include service innovation, user engagement, vulnerable service users (e.g., health care), and engagement mechanisms (e.g., gamification). She has published in highly recognized journals such as the Journal of Product Innovation Management, Journal of Interactive Marketing, and Journal of Business Research. She is cofounder of the Annual Doctoral Symposium in the service field, “��������� – SERVSIG – Let’s Talk ���������t Service,” serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Services Marketing, and is member of the Editorial Boards of several journals. She is currently guest editing two special issues for Journal of Services Marketing and Recherche et Applications en Marketing (A-ranked journal of the French Marketing Association). 

Sanjit K. Roy, Ph.D, is Associate Professor of Marketing and Fellow at the Centre for Business Data Analytics at UWA Business School, The University of Western Australia. He is a certified LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® Facilitator. He is an Associate Editor at the European Journal of Marketing and on the Editorial Boards of Journal of Business Research, Journal of Services Marketing, Journal of Strategic Marketing, and the Journal of Service Theory & Practice. His research interests include marketing of services, impact of new technology on marketing, and transformative service research. He has published in the European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Marketing Management, Information Systems Frontiers, and Journal of Services Marketing, among others. He has guest edited special issues for the Journal of Service Theory & Practice, Journal of Strategic Marketing, and International Journal of Bank Marketing. Currently, he is also guest editing special issues for the International Journal of Information Management and Journal of Marketing Management.

Kelly Hewett, Ph.D, is the Reagan Professor of Marketing and Haslam Family Faculty Research Fellow at the University of Tennessee’s Haslam College of Business. She also serves as Editor in Chief of the Journal of International Marketing. Prior to joining UT, she worked for five years at Bank of America, where she was a senior vice president in the firm’s corporate marketing group. Previously, she had a ten-year academic career and also held prior positions in international marketing and marketing research. Kelly’s research has been published in the Journal of Marketing, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and Journal of International Marketing, among others.

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The world’s top leisure brands, such as CrossFit, Pokémon Go and Tinder, have built empires by creating sticky journeys that keep customers as addicted as possible. Athletes don’t just work out at CrossFit, they’re obsessed with it. Gamers don’t just play Pokémon Go for a little while, they’re hooked for hours on end. Singles on Tinder don’t just hunt for new partners, they’re addicted to the hunt itself. And from Netflix to Spotify to TikTok, a new generation of media companies has completely transformed the television, radio and video industry. Audiences are no longer willing to sit through formulaic shows such as NBC’s “Law & Order.” They want “Game of Thrones”-like drama—compelling, polarizing, hard-to-pull-away-from serials that shock, delight and frequently enrage their viewers. 

The secret to the success of these breakthrough leisure brands is creating an insanely “sticky” journey that defies all the usual hyperrational rules of marketing. It’s not about creating consistently good customer experiences, but about creating intentionally chaotic, maddening and unpredictable ones. It’s also not about making services convenient, easy or satisfying, but instead about making them challenging, suspenseful and thrilling. The resulting customer journeys are exhilarating. We call these journeys sticky to emphasize that customers can’t seem to pull away. At the heart of these sticky journeys is an “involvement spiral”—a roller coaster ride of intensely good and bad experiences that keep customers riveted.��

How Do These Leisure Brands Create Such Sticky Journeys?

The first step is providing customers with “rapid entry.” That means giving customers free, quick and easy access to the service as soon as they express interest, whether in person or online. These brands don’t bore customers with a lot of information or ask too many questions. And they don’t pressure customers to sign up for a monthly subscription—at least not at the beginning. Tinder does this first step particularly well. Unlike traditional matchmaking websites that begin with extensive compatibility questionnaires, the Tinder app asks customers for no more than their age, gender and distance preferences. Customers can also import their photos from Facebook, so they can dive into the Tinder dating pool immediately.

The second step is providing customers with “endless variation” along the user experience journey. Whether we’re talking about dating, gaming, working out or something else, the only way to keep customers excited is by creating unpredictable experiences. Companies create such endless variation using a trio of techniques: 

• Opening the service system to a massive number of service elements (e.g., the hundreds of possible exercises at CrossFit, virtual creatures in Pokémon Go or user profiles on Tinder). 
• Making frequent additions, subtractions and changes to those elements. 
• Offering unique configurations of those elements at each service encounter. 

For instance, CrossFit changes workouts daily and makes them extraordinarily challenging. Drawing on various sports, fitness regimens and military drills, no two workouts are ever the same. Once customers are swept up in the endlessly varied customer journey, they are more eager to sign up for monthly memberships. 

The third step is sparking new customer journeys as soon as the current ones begin to run out of steam. Leisure brands recognize that all journeys come to an end. Even the most exciting adventures can become familiar, exhausting or boring after a while. Eventually, brands must offer their customers new journeys. For example, Nintendo, the parent company behind the “Animal Crossing” game franchise, has launched an entirely new generation of the game every few years. CrossFit coaches invite advanced athletes to Barbell Clubs and CrossFit competitions. And recently, Tinder launched offshoots such as Swipe Night, an event that matches users based on their responses to an interactive movie. 

Wondering how to get un-hooked? Some customers can keep their recreational addictions in check, but many others cannot. Maintaining daily self-discipline is just too difficult. For compulsive users, there’s only one answer: Cancel your subscription, delete the app and call a friend. 

Most customers won’t do that, and leisure brands are counting on it. 

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Reusable containers have become big brands: Ball jars, Baggu shopping totes and S’well water bottles, to name a few. But far fewer brands have bridged the gap between consumable products and reusable containers. At least, not since the milkman dropped off full bottles and picked up the empties.

There’s been a small but growing subset of consumers who are keenly interested in choosing sustainable products, but more average consumers are beginning to seek out items with a smaller environmental footprint. , 92% of more than 10,000 people surveyed said they believe the way we treat our planet now will have a large impact on the future, but 48% say that convenience takes priority even with the knowledge that they should care more about the environment through their purchasing habits. 

Big brands stepping into the field helps ease these shoppers into greener habits without expecting them to do much extra work. Plus, a known brand name brings assurance that the quality they’re accustomed to remains.

Reducing Guilt, Increasing Convenience

dove into the concept of how a reduction of guilt can drive consumer decision-making as it relates to sustainability. “We find that feelings of guilt and pride, activated by a single consumption episode, can regulate sustainable consumption by affecting consumers’ general perception of effectiveness,” the authors write. Their research, they concluded, could help with the development of sustainable marketing initiatives. 

“Consumers are feeling more and more guilty any time they put stuff in the landfill,” says Karen Page Winterich, marketing professor at Penn State University. But as the Getty research suggested, consumers struggle to overcome their need for convenience—despite their guilt. 

Some brands have decided to take matters into their own hands and offer reusable packaging. One notable and recent example is . The online store and delivery service allows consumers to create an account and fill their baskets with grocery products—namely big brands such as Clorox, Febreze and Seventh Generation. In addition to the products’ costs, customers pay a fully refundable deposit for each reusable package, between $2 and $5 per item. The products arrive via UPS to customers’ homes in a tote bag, which they then refill with the empty containers once done and schedule a pickup. 

Heather Crawford, vice president of marketing and e-commerce at Loop parent company TerraCycle, says Loop’s customer insights team found that consumers want to choose a more eco-friendly product when shopping, but they don’t want to have to go out of their way to do it. “People feel really guilty every time they throw something single use in the trash,” she says. “They can imagine it going to a landfill, they can imagine it’s not being recycled, but they don’t know what to do—and there’s not really anything that’s actually accessible or convenient, or fits into their lifestyle that they can easily integrate into their lives.” 

Loop’s convenience is in the products being delivered directly to customers’ doors in reusable containers, which they can then send right back to be refilled when done. There are also plans to roll out a partnership with Walgreens and Kroger to carry the reusable packages on store shelves to add another layer of convenience. Such ease of use may have also helped Loop boost its numbers in recent months during the pandemic: When it looked like the needle was bending back toward single-use, disposable products in response to COVID-19 concerns, Loop reported a sales surge. (The company didn’t disclose specific figures.) 

“If you can get the convenience factor right, you can really drive higher levels of adoption,” Crawford says. 

Reducing Trial and Error

Loop provides another layer of convenience for customers: offering the brands they already trust. The trend of reusable packaging has been led in large part by start-up firms, so consumers seeking a more sustainable option are also faced with having to test these relatively unknown players. 

Winterich points to the so-called sustainability liability, . The research showed that sustainability is often correlated with gentleness attributes, which can be a liability if a product is purchased for its strength-related features. For example, consumers may be dissuaded from buying a sustainable car shampoo because they want a strong product and may perceive the sustainable version to be too weak. A brand such as Clorox has the name recognition of making reliable products; packaging it in a reusable container only sweetens the deal for a consumer. 

“I might be a very brand-loyal Tide user, but yet I start to see there are other options with less waste, so I feel torn,” Winterich says. “If Tide can actually offer me that lower-waste, reusable version, then I get the best of both worlds. I keep that brand loyalty that I’ve had for years and I’m still able to reduce my waste.” 

It’s another way that brands working with Loop aren’t asking consumers to significantly shift their behaviors. When it comes to sustainability, Crawford says Americans consider it to be a matter of individual behaviors—versus parts of Europe, for example, where consumers expect the government and corporations to step up to the plate. In fact, when Loop entered the German market, it was competing with an already robust packaging return program in the country. 

“Americans are used to voting with their wallet for things that are important to them,” Crawford says. “We’re used to paying a small price premium for sustainability initiatives. And [Americans] don’t necessarily look to legislators or big businesses yet as leaders who will solve the problem. In many cases, it’s actually individuals who are adjusting their own budgets and their own spending patterns to buy from products and platforms that they believe in.” 

Lead From a Mission, Build Community, Show Impact

Brands with reusable packaging could partner with a service such as Loop—Crawford says the company tries to make the barrier for entry as low as possible—but the key to marketing any sustainable product is to remain purpose-driven to the core. 

“[Consumers] want to spend on products and causes that they believe in,” Crawford says. “It’s incredibly important that you give them a clear understanding of what the value or mission of your product is, beyond just its regular features and benefits.” 

In this sense, smaller start-ups sometimes gain the upper hand. As Winterich explains, environmentally conscious brands often go beyond reusable or otherwise sustainable packaging by using ingredients that are eco-friendly as well. Start-ups have also helped to make reusable containers trendy, which pushes both consumers and larger brands to try it and be at the forefront. 

And the more something becomes a trend, the more it appeals to consumers who enjoy a sense of community. 

“As we see more and more brands emerging that are really driven by activism, with true purpose and cause behind them, it’s really important for people to feel as though they’re part of something,” Crawford says. “When they can see their community engaging with a product, when they see people that they follow on social media, when they hear their friends talking about it, and when a company reflects back to them how many other consumers are adopting a product or trend, it makes them feel part of something.” 

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Sunday’s Oscars telecast made history by awarding Best Picture to an international film (“Parasite”) for the first time, but its other landmark achievement wasn’t as positive. Fewer people tuned in for the live show than ever before—23.6 million watched, which is three million less than the previous record in 2018 and down 20% from last year. Speculation abound, and some are quick to point the finger at the ceremony’s lack of host, or the fact that the Super Bowl and the State of the Union, both also live events, happened quite recently. But the problem might lie with the number of commercials aired during the three-and-a-half-hour telecast, totaling 40 minutes—an eternity in today’s streaming age. Next year’s ceremony will air later in February, and no word yet on how the program will handle its commercials.

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Though the online grocery market reached $26 billion in 2018 and is expected to hit $100 billion by 2025, Peapod is exiting the industry in the Midwest, leaving roughly 50,000 customers in Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana without service. The move, which will result in the loss of more than 500 jobs, was made to shift focus toward in-store pick-up as well as delivery—a move that Walmart advertised itself during this year’s Super Bowl. The Midwest also proved a difficult market for Peapod, as it exists in the region as online-only without physical locations and therefore couldn’t afford mindful shoppers the opportunity to see produce firsthand. Big winners include Instacart and Amazon, viewed as key competitors.

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Unilever announced it will no longer advertise its ice cream brands to children younger than 12 after 2020, saying its decision was influenced by rising childhood obesity levels. Under the company’s plan, its ice cream marketing will avoid media in which children children younger than 12 represent more than 25% of the audience, a principle also employed by the UK Advertising Standards Authority. Unilever said it would�� avoid advertising in or sponsoring films, promoting products in programs, offering gifts and toys, or using licensed characters that appeal to the young age group. It will also avoid using influencers who are either younger than 12 or appeal to kids that age. Unilever plans to launch a “Responsibly made for kids” logo to identify products designed for children with a maximum of 110 calories and 12 grams of sugar per portion.

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The New York Times reports that a growing portion of Amazon’s business are third-party sellers that stock the website with goods that disappear as quickly as they appear, also overwhelming the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. “A seller in America might start with a brand idea and need to figure out how to get it manufactured; a seller connected to a factory in China’s manufacturing capital needs to figure out how to sell to Americans, which Amazon has been working hard to facilitate,” the Times reports. Kian Golzari, who works with marketplace sellers and corporate clients to source products from China, told the paper that it’s a matter of branding versus selling: the pseudo-brands sell until the market is flooded with the product, then they move on.

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Catalog mailings have been increasing since 2015, with response rates from catalogs increasing by 170% from 2004 to 2018. And evidence suggests that Millennials are particularly interested in catalogs they receive in the mail. Researchers partnered with a specialty luxury watches and jewelry e-commerce retailer to test the appeal of catalogs. They found consumers in the group that received emails and catalogs led to a 49% lift in sales and 125% lift in inquiries, compared to the control group, while the email-only group only had 28% increase in sales and 77% lift in inquiries over the control group. “When we marry our research above with a review of retail trends and consumer psychology, we see how catalogs stand apart from the increasingly cluttered digital inboxes and social media feeds,” the authors wrote in HBR. “As physical products, they can linger in consumers’ houses long after emails are deleted, which increases top-of-mind awareness among consumers.”

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Nonprofit organization Truth in Advertising has claimed that Rihanna’s buzzy Savage x Fenty line “ensnares consumers into unwanted monthly charges.” When items are added to a consumer’s shopping cart, a membership plan is automatically added to the order—customers must then proactively remove the charge, which may cause the price of items to increase. Savage x Fenty has denied the claims, stating that “These accusations are false and based on misconceptions of our business.”

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Last summer, a reporter for Vice News, Allie Conti, . Minutes before checking into a spacious and light-filled apartment as pictured online, the owner of the space contacted Conti with some sobering news: The toilet had overflowed and a plumber had been delayed. But as consolation, he offered another one of his properties that he promised was comparable and, in fact, larger.

Conti began calculating her refund when she arrived at what she describes as “what looked more like a flophouse than someone’s home.” It was dusty and dirty with minimal decor and shoddy furniture. She stayed the night and bolted for a hotel the next day. Securing a refund proved futile. Because the transaction had already cleared and Airbnb’s refund policy is confusing and arcane, Conti received just a fraction of her money back, and only after hounding customer service representatives for days.

What Conti uncovered is a nationwide issue throughout the sharing economy. Providers have discovered ways to embellish or entirely fabricate what it is they offer, whether it’s using stock photography in an Airbnb listing, or . In each case, the scammers are contractors, not direct corporate employees, and take advantage of how difficult it is for companies in the sharing economy to quickly address concerns, issue refunds and closely monitor behavior. This raises an ethical dilemma: How can companies incentivize good behavior after christening people who are essentially strangers, with no stake in the business, as brand ambassadors?

Problems with a Ratings-Based Economy

The sharing economy relies heavily on the platform itself—usually a ratings-based app—to self-select ethical providers, regardless of how large the company grows.

“[The sharing economy] seems to be moving more toward a typical corporate model as it matures and grows—huge organizations that are becoming more like a hotel or rental car company,” says , professor of marketing at the University of Illinois. “[However,] the providers aren’t employees, so [the company] doesn’t have the same kind of power to monitor and enforce. What’s happening is they’re focusing heavily on reputation systems and rankings. … Primarily, that’s how ethical behavior is monitored.”

This system falls far short of ironclad. Conti’s scammer had gamed their reviews by creating other fake accounts to praise them and their property. The scammer also lied to Conti and claimed Airbnb’s review algorithm was broken, so any issues should be addressed directly and not posted. Then, when Conti began to cry foul, the account disappeared only to resurface under a different name, purporting to rent an apartment with strikingly similar photos to the first.

Companies in the sharing economy have set themselves up with few options to ensure customers encounter ethical interactions with providers. This loose grasp on a guaranteed ethical experience can quickly drag down the reputation of an entire brand.

“Think about buying a new car or a new house,” Rindfleisch says. “After a while, you hear the squeaks. We see that happening now with the sharing economy, especially with some of the social issues. My guess is it wouldn’t take very long to have the platform brand tarnished.”

Brands as Bankers

To more effectively promote ethical behavior, experts offer a solution that hits scammers where it matters most: their wallets.

, associate professor of marketing at Washington University in St. Louis, has written extensively on the sharing economy alongside Rindfleisch. He suggests that companies act as a financial middleman between the user and provider. Jiang recommends implementing a holding period between when the user pays the fee and when the provider receives that money, which is only made available after service is complete and any lingering issues are resolved. In the case of Airbnb, the company could withhold rental payments from new hosts for a month, leaving ample time for complaints to be filed and responses solicited. As the host remains on Airbnb and garners positive reviews, that month-long period can be reduced; Airbnb could even reward exceptional hosts by reducing its fee.

On the flipside, Jiang recommends that renters be required to complete their stay and payment before leaving the all-important review and star rating. “On some platforms, you don’t have to have a real, verified transaction to write a review,” he says. “Once you set this up, it would save the company a cost, because … if you have a good policy and implement it a few times, people will know the system and they will stop [scamming].”

Avoiding False Positives

Rindfleisch posits that providers who have access to more customer data would have an easier time calibrating their behavior toward improved experiences. “Part of the reason for a bad service encounter could be just a lack of information,” he says. To keep data anonymous and protected, he adds that “the solution would be something along the lines of providing aggregate statistics. For example: ‘Here are the most common complaints in your specific location … or age group,’ then share that market intelligence in aggregate form rather than individual level, just like a firm would do.”

This sort of data would also help to shore up any cultural misunderstandings that could be perceived as ethical violations, particularly when working with international customers. Similar to how companies control the receipt of payments, companies could reward great providers with a greater amount of information, further feeding a positive review cycle and ensuring stellar contractors remain on the platform and secure more business.

Ethical providers may not be employees, but brand ambassadors who see strong ROI are happy brand ambassadors.

Illustration by Bill Murphy.

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