What Luxury Brands Know About Customer Experience That Small Businesses Don't
What Luxury Brands Know About Customer Experience That Small Businesses Don't
Luxury brands don't hold onto customers because of price. They hold onto them because of how the experience feels, from the first sale to the fifth year. Those standards don't require a luxury price tag. Most small businesses just don't know what they are.
What Actually Makes Luxury Customers Come Back?
Malena spent 18 years at Coach. The question she gets most often is some version of: "What's the secret?" What most people are really asking is what makes those brands so good at holding onto customers when so many other businesses can't.
The answer isn't the product. Well, sometimes it is, but that doesn't last..because product can be copied. It isn't the price either. Premium pricing is the result of a great experience, not the cause of it. What luxury brands do better than almost anyone else is make customers feel like the relationship didn't begin and end at the register.
A study by Bain and Company found that customers who have the best past experiences spent 140 percent more compared to those with the worst past experiences. The experience itself becomes the product. PwC puts it plainly: 73 percent of consumers say experience ranks right alongside price and product quality in their purchasing decisions. Not second to it. Alongside it.
None of the requires a flagship store. It requires paying attention to how the customer actually feels the whole time they're with you.
What Does a Luxury Experience Look Like Up Close?
Walk into a Coach store that's running the way it's supposed to run and something happens in the first thirty seconds. You feel noticed. Not performed-at.. actually noticed. There's a glance that lands, a beat of attention that tells you someone saw you walk in. The greeting follows naturally from that. It doesn't sound like it came from a training manual.
The Moment Most Businesses Don't Think About: Being Seen
What Malena found over 18 years is that the teams who got this right weren't performing warmth. They were genuinely paying attention to who walked through the door. You can feel the difference in about three seconds. Most customers can't tell you exactly what it was. They just know whether it was there or not.
The same moment exists in every small business. The way someone is greeted when they walk in, call in, or get a response after a job is done either tells them they're a person the business is glad to hear from, or just a name in the system. Customers register one of those two things whether they ever say so or not.
