For years, growth has been driven by a familiar set of levers: innovation, communications, pricing and distribution. Yet the latest report from JKR and Kantar suggests another growth engine is emerging in plain sight: the experiences brands create every day.
As experiences become an increasingly important source of competitive advantage, organisations face a new challenge. How do you create experiences that customers not only appreciate, but actively remember, choose and return to?
Perhaps the answer lies in understanding the two forces that shape almost every human decision: the Heart and the Mind.
Every customer decision is shaped by a balance between emotion and logic. The Mind seeks certainty, ease and effectiveness. The Heart looks for meaning, connection, and relevance.
The Mind wants logic. The Mind wants certainty. The Mind asks: “Does this make sense?”
The Heart sees the world differently. The Heart wants connection. The Heart wants meaning. The Heart asks: “How does this make me feel?”
The magic happens when both agree. And increasingly, I believe the same is true for customer experience.
For years, organisations have focused on improving the rational side of experience. Reducing friction, simplifying journeys, speeding up service, and digitising interactions. These things matter. Nobody wants a difficult experience. But in today’s world, easy is expected. Convenience is no longer a differentiator. It’s the price of entry.
The experiences that customers remember, recommend, and return to are the ones that engage both the Heart and the Mind: experiences that make sense but also feel right. Together, the Heart and the Mind create memorable experiences because they create affinity while also being unique and authentic to your brand.
How Meaningfully Different Experiences (MDX) bring together the heart and Mind
This is where Kantar’s Meaningfully Different Experiences (MDX) methodology becomes incredibly powerful. At its simplest, both meaning and difference can be both rational and emotional. Heart + Mind = Meaningfully Different Experiences (Effective, Easy, Affinity, Authentic, Unique, Inspiring). They make customers feel understood, valued, and relevant. Different experiences create choice. They give customers a reason to select your brand over another. Growth happens when an experience achieves both.Experience drives far more brand equity than advertising
This is exactly what struck me when reading Be Distinctive Everywhere: The Experience Edition, the latest report from Kantar and JKR. For years, marketers have focused on building brands through communications, advertising, and innovation. Yet the findings show that customer experience has always been one of the most powerful ways to grow your brand. That's a significant opportunity for CX teams to partner with marketing and drive greater business impact.
The report states that paid media builds just 28% of brand equity. The rest is shaped by the owned and earned experiences people have with a brand every day.
The commercial implication is hard to ignore. Kantar BrandZ data highlights that brands that improve and amplify customer experience are 2.5 times more likely to grow market share. That finding reframes CX from an operational discipline into a growth strategy.
Experiences are not simply supporting the brand. They’re one of the primary ways brands create Meaningful Difference in customers’ minds.
The stakes become even higher in an AI-powered world. Today, more than 80% of consumers are already using AI assistants, and in some categories, up to 40% of brands fail to appear in AI-generated answers. AI assistants are rapidly becoming gatekeepers of discovery, consideration, and choice, according to Kantar and JKR report.
What makes this particularly important for CX leaders is that AI does not learn from advertising alone. It increasingly learns from the signals that experiences create: customer reviews, conversations, social content, and earned media. In other words, experiences are no longer only shaping what customers think about brands. They’re increasingly shaping what AI thinks about brands too.
Understanding root causes that shape experiences
So, what does this mean for the CX profession? If experiences are becoming one of the most powerful sources of Meaningful Difference and future growth, then the role of CX leaders is changing too.You have more than enough dashboards. You know your customers journeys inside-out. You track NPS, CSAT and operational CX metrics. You know what happened. But you often struggle to understand why.
Why did advocacy fall? Why are customers abandoning the journey? Why is adoption lower than expected? Why did customers love one experience but ignore another? How can I make key experiences more memorable, meaningful and different?
These are not dashboard questions. These are the Heart-and-Mind questions that traditional dashboards struggle to answer and that Kantar Live CX was specifically designed to unlock.
Combining qualitative depth with quantitative scale, Kantar Live helps organisations bring customers directly into the decision-making process in real time. Not weeks later. Not after launch. But while decisions are still being made.
Three customer experience questions every CX leader should answer
1. What creates advocacy? The Mind asks: "Can I rely on this brand?" The Heart asks: "Do I feel valued by this brand?"When both are satisfied, advocacy follows. The challenge for CX leaders is understanding which experiences strengthen trust, emotional connection, and preference. Kantar Live CX helps uncover the moments creating promoters, passives and detractors, so organisations know what to fix, protect and amplify.
2. What makes an experience memorable? The Mind asks: "Does this make my life easier?" The Heart asks: "Will I remember this experience?"
The most powerful experiences do more than remove friction. They create affinity, stand out from competitors, and feel authentic to the brand. These are the experiences that customers notice, value, and choose again.
3. What drives digital adoption? The Mind asks: "Is this easy to use?" The Heart asks: "Do I feel confident continuing?"
Customers rarely abandon journeys because of a single issue. Friction, uncertainty, and disengagement often build together. Understanding both the functional and emotional barriers helps organisations create digital experiences customers genuinely want to use while improving adoption, conversion, and brand preference.
Where experience becomes a competitive advantage
The future of customer experience will not be won by technology alone, nor by emotion alone. The winners will be organisations that understand how the Heart and the Mind work together.As customer experience becomes an increasingly important driver of growth, it's vital to understand not only what customers do, but why they do it. The challenge for CX leaders is no longer simply understanding customer behaviour. It is understanding which experiences create the strongest emotional and rational reasons to choose.
Growth does not happen when customers simply understand an experience. It happens when they feel it matters and recognise it as different enough to choose again. That is where Meaningful meets Different, and where experiences become memorable. It’s how customer experience becomes a brand-building engine and ultimately where growth begins.
Discover how Kantar Live helps turn real-time customer feedback into growth opportunities and more meaningful, memorable customer experiences, or learn more about Kantar's Customer Experience solutions.
