Editorial
Research Report
Business Leaders CX Report: What’s Working and What’s Not in AI-Driven CX
The Gist
- Experience investment is not translating into clarity. Brands are spending more on CX, personalization and martech, yet customers often experience more noise, pressure and confusion.
- The real problem is identity discontinuity. It happens when companies modernize, digitize or personalize experiences without preserving the core promise customers recognize.
- More sophistication can weaken meaning. New tools, channels and journeys may look like progress internally while making the customer experience harder to interpret.
- Marketers need continuity, not just optimization. The task is to align what the experience does with what the brand is supposed to mean.
I took my son to The Ringling Bros. Circus recently.
I had not been in decades, so I did not walk in thinking about what was missing or what should be there. I did not have expectations. I was not looking for a specific act or trying to recreate something from when I was a kid. I knew there were no animals. I was just there to experience it with my kid and see how he reacted.
From the start, it felt different.
Admittedly, this is subjective, but the entire vibe was off. Not broken. Not poorly executed. Just off.
Table of Contents
- When Better Experiences Lose the Plot
- Is Marketing Like a Circus Today?
- The Data Shows a System Improving Itself Into Decline
- Where Identity Discontinuity Shows Up in Modern Marketing
- What Jaguar, Starbucks, Streaming and Cracker Barrel Got Wrong
- Why This Keeps Happening Inside Organizations
- Where the Argument Needs Nuance
- Conclusion: More Capability, Less Meaning
When Better Experiences Lose the Plot
To keep it simple, here is the experience as it unfolded. The show opened with a burst of energy. Then the acrobats came out, and they were objectively impressive. That part worked. But the structure around them did not. There was a DJ instead of a live band, which I get in today’s day and age, but the music leaned heavily into pop culture and felt forced rather than additive. Between acts, the energy dropped off, then tried to recover through a small group of over-performers pushing a version of enthusiasm that never quite landed.
At a certain point, it became clear what the issue was. The show was overproduced.
Even my kid said it plainly. Circus Vasquez is far superior. It is exciting, with a consistent energy that feels natural and not overdone. And they also have a live band, which I prefer.
I kept coming back to the same thought while watching what they still claim is “The Greatest Show on Earth.” Not that something was missing, but that I could not clearly define what it was. It did not feel like a traditional circus, but it also did not fully commit to being something else. It borrowed from concerts, stage shows, and Cirque-style performances, then combined them into something polished but overdone.
Nothing failed on its own. That is what made it more noticeable.
The problem was not execution. The problem was identity.
The experience had been enhanced, modernized and optimized, but the core signal of what it actually is had been diluted in the process. It still carries the same name. It still targets the same audience. But it no longer delivers a clear version of what that name represents.
And the more I thought about it, the more familiar it felt.
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Is Marketing Like a Circus Today?
This is the same pattern I see in marketing every day. Teams add more channels, more personalization, more orchestration, more content. Each decision is rational. Each investment is justified. But when it all comes together, the message becomes harder to interpret, not easier.
The circus is just an example.
This is what happens when experience design evolves faster than the meaning it is supposed to deliver.
Most customer experience critiques begin in the wrong place. They focus on friction, lag, poor service, bad interfaces or weak messaging, as if the main risk is that the experience is not polished enough. That is sometimes true, but it misses a larger and more dangerous pattern. In many cases, the experience is becoming more advanced while becoming less clear. The issue is not deterioration through neglect. It is deterioration through enhancement.
When Experience Evolves but Identity Breaks
That is what I mean by identity discontinuity. It occurs when a company adds sophistication, speed, personalization, automation or visual modernization without preserving the core promise that made the experience intelligible and valuable in the first place. The customer still sees activity, still encounters touchpoints and still receives messages, but the connective tissue weakens. The experience no longer tells a coherent story about what the brand is, what it delivers or why it deserves attention. The system keeps moving, but the meaning starts to leak.
This is why so many experience investments produce confusion instead of lift. The organization sees progress because it can point to new tooling, more refined segmentation, redesigned customer journeys or more advanced orchestration. The customer sees something else entirely. They see a growing pile of interactions that no longer add up to a clear value exchange. Not because the company stopped trying, but because it started optimizing around layers rather than identity.
That distinction changes the diagnosis. If the issue were simply poor execution, the remedy would be to improve execution. But if the issue is identity discontinuity, then more execution can make the problem worse. A badly aligned system that operates at greater speed and scale does not become stronger. It becomes more efficient at producing confusion.
The Data Shows a System Improving Itself Into Decline
Editor's note: Across Martech and CX, spending and sophistication continue to rise while usability, clarity and customer outcomes often move the other way. The table below highlights where the disconnect is showing up most clearly.
| Category | Key statistic | What it signals |
|---|---|---|
| Martech spending | Global Martech investment projected to reach $215 billion by 2027 | Budgets continue expanding despite widespread ROI uncertainty. |
| ROI visibility | In interviews with roughly 50 Fortune 500 CMOs, none could quantify Martech stack ROI | Leaders often fund complexity without clear performance proof. |
| Stack utilization | Utilization fell from 58% in 2020 to 42% in 2022 and 33% across 2023-2025 | Organizations own more capability than they operationalize. |
| Underused tools | 44% of marketing stacks go entirely underutilized (Deloitte) | Unused technology is now a structural issue, not an exception. |
| CX performance | Forrester’s U.S. Customer Experience Index declined for a third straight year; effectiveness fell to 64%, ease to 66% | Experience quality is weakening even as investment rises. |
| Consumer sentiment | 71% of consumers say companies need to improve CX | Customers increasingly feel the gap between promise and delivery. |
| Personalization backlash | 53% of customers reported negative experiences with personalized marketing | Targeting can feel intrusive or manipulative when poorly executed. |
| Purchase regret | Those customers were 3.2 times more likely to regret a purchase and 44% less likely to buy again | Short-term conversion tactics may damage long-term loyalty. |
| Message fatigue | 70% of consumers say they tune out excessive brand messaging | More communication often produces less attention. |
| Revenue impact | More than one-third stopped buying from a brand due to excessive messaging | Communication overload directly affects revenue. |
| Competitive switching | 57% switched to a competitor because of message overload | Fatigue creates openings for rivals. |
| Unsubscribes | 70% unsubscribed from at least three brands in a three-month span | Customers are actively reducing noise in their inboxes. |
| Journey friction | More than 70% of online carts are abandoned | Many digital journeys remain too difficult to complete. |
| Checkout complexity | Average U.S. checkout contains 23.48 form elements versus an ideal range of 12 to 14 | Optimization often adds friction instead of removing it. |
The combined pattern is difficult to ignore: systems keep becoming more elaborate while becoming less effective at communicating value, reducing friction and building trust.
Where Identity Discontinuity Shows Up in Modern Marketing
The easiest place to see identity discontinuity is in martech itself. Stacks were supposed to give organizations a clearer view of the customer and a stronger ability to act on that view. Instead, many stacks now function like a warehouse of partly connected possibilities, where more tools create more overlap, more interfaces and more duplicated purpose. When the infrastructure designed to sharpen the customer picture instead makes the organization less certain about what it is doing, identity starts to blur from the inside out.
The same dynamic shows up in personalization. Brands act as if any increase in relevance is automatically good, but relevance is not the same thing as coherence. A message can be technically personalized and still feel strategically wrong because it introduces a new frame, a new prompt or a new demand that weakens the overall story. When personalization stops reinforcing a clear value proposition and starts multiplying interpretations, it does not deepen the experience. It fragments it.
When Journeys, Brands and Loyalty Lose Coherence
Customer journeys often break in the same way. A journey can be beautifully orchestrated at the workflow level and still feel incoherent at the human level. The customer does not experience segmentation logic, trigger conditions or orchestration rules. They experience timing, message tone, perceived pressure and whether the brand seems to understand what matters right now. When those elements stop aligning, the journey becomes a string of interactions rather than a meaningful path.
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Brand positioning is where the consequences become most visible. Visual systems get modernized, language gets refreshed and the company begins telling itself that reinvention is the same as renewed relevance. But if the redesign removes the cues that once made the brand legible, then the brand becomes more polished and less recognizable at the same time. Customers may notice the change immediately, but they often struggle to explain what the brand now stands for.
(So-called) Loyalty programs add another version of the same story. Consumers enroll in an average of eight programs but actively engage with only five, and in many industries more than half engage with just one program at all. The enrollment numbers make the system look successful, but the usage numbers tell a harsher truth. Many loyalty experiences now exist at the edge of customer attention because they offer mechanics without strengthening identity, trust or meaning.
Related Article: Customer Loyalty Starts With Consistency, Ends With Advocacy
What Jaguar, Starbucks, Streaming and Cracker Barrel Got Wrong
Jaguar and the Cost of Abandoning Identity
Jaguar’s rebrand is one of the clearest recent examples because the disconnect was so visible. The company dropped the leaping cat emblem, introduced a minimalist wordmark and launched a campaign that showed no cars while leaning into a fashion-coded, lifestyle-forward posture. The stated aim was to modernize and reposition the brand for a new audience. But the change did not simply update the brand’s expression. It severed the visible link to the performance identity customers had associated with Jaguar for decades, and the sales collapse that followed made the cost of that severance hard to ignore.
Starbucks and the Erosion of the Third Place
Starbucks made a different type of move, but the pattern was similar. Years of mobile-first expansion, operational speed and app-centered convenience slowly chipped away at the “third place” identity that made Starbucks more than a coffee transaction. The company got faster and more efficient, but in many locations it also became more transactional, less atmospheric and less emotionally distinctive. When comparable store sales and transaction volume declined, the signal was not that digital tools are bad. The signal was that operational enhancement had started to hollow out the very experience that justified the premium.
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Streaming and the Overload of Endless Choice
Streaming platforms reveal what identity discontinuity looks like when content abundance becomes the strategy. The category built ever-larger libraries, more pricing tiers, stronger recommendation engines and more ubiquitous access, all in the name of making the experience richer. But as households spread themselves across multiple services and price fatigue intensified, platform distinctiveness weakened. More content did not make individual services more meaningful. It made them harder to differentiate, easier to cancel and more likely to blend into a general sense of subscription overload.
Cracker Barrel and the Backlash to Losing Nostalgia
Cracker Barrel shows how dangerous this pattern becomes when leadership mistakes internal taste for market relevance. In trying to attract younger diners, the company moved toward a more minimalist identity and stripped away nostalgic imagery that had long functioned as an anchor of brand meaning. The update may have looked cleaner inside a boardroom, but it also removed part of the emotional contract customers actually recognized. The backlash, traffic decline and eventual reversal were not signs that customers hate change. They were signs that customers resist change that removes the cues that tell them what the brand is.
What links all of these cases is not bad execution. In each case, serious effort, resources and strategic intent were clearly present. The common failure was that enhancement targeted expression, efficiency or novelty without protecting the interpretive core. The companies did not simply change. They changed the wrong layer first.
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Why This Keeps Happening Inside Organizations
One reason identity discontinuity keeps spreading is that organizations are structured to reward visible enhancement. New systems, redesigned journeys, expanded channels and personalization engines all look like progress in planning documents and budget meetings. They create milestones, procurement wins and launch moments that are easy to communicate internally. Protecting the continuity of brand meaning, by contrast, is slower, less glamorous and harder to package as innovation.
A second reason is that teams tend to optimize from within their lane. The CRM team improves sequencing, the product team improves flows, the brand team updates language and the operations team increases speed. None of those moves is irrational on its own, but the customer does not experience the company through internal swim lanes. The customer experiences the combined output. When no one is explicitly accountable for the continuity of that combined output, identity becomes a casualty of local optimization.
Measurement also contributes to the problem because many of the metrics organizations rely on reward movement rather than meaning. Tool adoption, send volume, open rates, click rates, throughput and platform implementation milestones all make activity visible. They do not necessarily make coherence visible. That gap matters because a company can hit a long list of internal progress markers while steadily weakening the customer’s ability to understand the value being offered.
AI is now accelerating this risk rather than solving it. McKinsey found that 88% of organizations report AI adoption, yet only 39% report any EBIT impact, while Gartner predicts that more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by 2027 because of unclear ROI, data readiness problems or legacy complexity. AI is not failing because the models are weak. It is failing because organizations are layering AI onto systems that already lack operational clarity and identity discipline.
The result is predictable. Teams add sophistication where they can, because sophistication is visible and fundable. What they do not do with the same discipline is ask whether each enhancement strengthens the customer’s understanding of the brand or weakens it. That is how experience enhancement turns into identity erosion without anyone intending it. I often write about operational readiness, but in this case … this is more like customer readiness.
What Marketers Need to Do Now
Editor's note: Optimization alone will not fix identity discontinuity. Marketers need sharper discipline around meaning, signal clarity and what should remain constant.
| Priority move | What it means | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Audit for identity before optimization | Most teams review journeys for friction, conversion opportunities, missed triggers and creative performance. Those reviews matter, but they miss the central question: does this experience still clearly express what the brand is and why it matters? | If the answer is vague, inconsistent or channel-dependent, the organization has an identity problem before it has a performance problem. |
| Treat stack utilization as a strategic signal | A system running at 33% utilization is not simply undertrained. It is usually overbought, underaligned or built around use cases that never formed into a coherent operating model. | Before adding tools, marketers should force a harder conversation about what the stack is actually supposed to do for the brand, the customer and the business. |
| Reduce noise instead of multiplying touchpoints | If consumers are tuning brands out and unsubscribing due to message overload, the issue is no longer whether the next message can be slightly better. | The real question is whether the system has crossed the line from signal into interference. Ask what can be removed, not just what can be added. |
| Use personalization only when it clarifies | Personalization should help the customer understand what matters now, not introduce added decision pressure at the moment of choice. | If it makes the experience faster, clearer and more relevant, it works. If it increases cognitive load or weakens the core story, it is fragmentation wearing a data badge. |
| Preserve what must remain constant | Modernization is not the enemy, and neither is digitization. But brands must identify the elements of value, meaning and experience that must survive change. | Without continuity, brands keep modernizing themselves into dilution. Continuity is what makes progress interpretable. |
Where the Argument Needs Nuance
This argument should not be read as a claim that all experience enhancement backfires. Simplification, usability improvements and genuinely friction-reducing design changes can absolutely improve outcomes. If a checkout becomes shorter, if a service interaction becomes easier or if an interface becomes clearer, performance often improves because the enhancement strengthens the core task rather than obscuring it. The issue is not enhancement itself. The issue is enhancement that breaks interpretability.
The same nuance applies to personalization. Not every personalized experience is harmful, and not every orchestration effort increases noise. Under the right conditions, both can make the experience feel more useful and more human. But those conditions are narrower than the market tends to admit, and they usually depend on strong operational coordination and a stable identity underneath the technology.
It is also important not to confuse identity continuity with nostalgia or rigidity. Customers do not need brands to remain visually frozen or operationally static. What they need is continuity of meaning through change. A brand can update its appearance, channels, tools and interaction model as long as the customer can still recognize what is being promised and why it matters.
That is the standard many organizations are currently failing to meet. They keep changing the visible layer while neglecting the interpretive layer beneath it. The result is not simply weaker performance. It is a slower and more dangerous erosion of customer understanding. Once that erosion sets in, more enhancements rarely solve it. They usually deepen it.
Conclusion: More Capability, Less Meaning
The market has spent years treating better experience as a function of more capability. More data, more automation, more orchestration, more channels and more personalization were all supposed to move brands closer to the customer. In many cases, they have done the opposite. They have moved brands further away from their own core meaning while making the experience harder for customers to interpret.
That is why identity discontinuity matters. It gives a name to a pattern that too many organizations are still misreading as a simple performance issue, a creative issue or a tooling issue. The deeper problem is that companies are enhancing the experience without protecting the thing the experience is supposed to mean. They are polishing the surface while weakening the signal.
The brands that recover from this will not be the ones with the largest stacks, the most advanced orchestration or the highest message volume. They will be the ones that can answer a harder question with discipline: what must remain clear, recognizable and true as the experience evolves? The companies that cannot answer that question will keep mistaking motion for progress.
So, fine…Ringling Bros. isn’t what it was when I was a kid. I accept this unfortunate reality. But at the same time, I’m not confident that this complete overhaul hits the mark either.
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