What's New
Every week we publish new articles and add books to the library. Here's everything that landed this week.
The psychology of customer retention — why keeping a customer is psychologically different from acquiring one
The customer who is deciding whether to renew, expand, or continue a commercial relationship is not in the same psychological state as the customer who is deciding whether to make a first purchase. They have…
The Effortless Experience
Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman and Rick DeLisi
The Effortless Experience by Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman and Rick DeLisi. Dixon, Toman and DeLisi's research on what actually drives customer loyalty — which they find is not the creation of delight but the elimination of effort — provides the most directly applicable available challenge to the peak-creation retention strategy. Their specific finding that reducing customer effort in service interactions is more predictive of loyalty than exceeding expectations is an important counterpoint that qualifies the peak-end rule's implications and provides the most practically actionable available account of what excellent recent interaction quality actually requires. Customer Successby Nick Mehta, Dan Steinman and Lincoln Murphy. Mehta, Steinman and Murphy's account of the customer success discipline — the proactive management of the customer's achievement of their desired outcomes as the primary retention mechanism — provides the most practically structured available framework for implementing the identification-based trust development strategy that this article identifies as the mechanism of durable customer loyalty.
The psychology of customer retention — why keeping a customer is psychologically different from acquiring one
Retention is not a slower or cheaper version of acquisition. It is a different psychological problem entirely — governed by different mechanisms, producing different commercial dynamics, and requiring…
Price as a psychological signal — what your pricing communicates about your confidence in your own product
The price is not just a cost. It is a communication — about quality, about positioning, about how…
The psychology of the first purchase — what a customer is risking beyond money and how to reduce it
The barrier to first purchase is rarely the price. It is the full range of risks the customer…
Why trust is destroyed faster than it is built and what the asymmetry means for how you handle failure
Trust accumulates slowly through consistent behaviour and collapses quickly through a single violation. The asymmetry is not accidental — it is a structural feature of how the human…
How trust is built in a commercial relationship — the psychological mechanisms and timeline
Commercial trust is not built by marketing claims. It is built through accumulated behavioural evidence — in a…
Identity-driven purchasing — how buying becomes a statement about who the customer is or wants to be
The customer who buys a product is not only acquiring its functional utility. In many categories, they are…
Social proof and conformity — how other people's behaviour shapes individual purchase decisions
The customer evaluating a product is not evaluating it alone. They are evaluating it in the context of what others have chosen — and the research on how…
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