The Control Crisis
Why Your Customers Feel Powerless and what you should do about it
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Look around you. Every part of your customers' lives now has a control panel for which they pay. Their body has sleep trackers and glucose monitors. Their relationships have therapy scripts and boundary templates. Their work lives exist across Notion boards and inspiration apps.
But here's the twist: despite having more tools than ever, people feel less in control than ever before.
The Consumer Experience
Why Understanding Consumers’ Realities Is the Only Way Forward
At its heart, experience is not what brands build, but what people feel.
Yet much of what we call “customer experience” still reflects how businesses operate, not how humans live.
Our customers' world is fluid, chaotic, contradictory, and deeply personal.
The challenge isn’t to streamline transactions or get them to love us.
It’s for us to inhabit the lives that surround them.
We Don’t Own the Experience. The Customer Does.
Experience shouldn’t sit inside our dashboards.
It’s stitched together across contexts, emotions, identities, modes and more — all changing, often by the day.
That’s why an experience isn’t something we deliver.
We should create it.
And let our customers assemble it.
I believe customers don’t want to experience “our brand”.
They want to experience their lives in which our brand appears.
And so we shouldn’t manage experiences. We should manage possibilities — when we become useful, relevant, or invisible (by design).
The Disrupted Consumer
We’ve spent decades thinking the biggest disruptions are from tech.
But the most powerful disruptor today is the consumer.
They’ve absorbed the shocks of a permacrisis — economic insecurity, identity fragmentation, institutional mistrust, and climate anxiety. To cope, they’ve developed new reflexes: DIY filters, personal algorithms, dynamic values, identity fluidity. They shift modes constantly.
Through the day, a person might be a health-maximiser, a bored scroller, a price hacker, a parental protector, a burnout escapee, or a low-effort survivalist.
This isn’t a new segment. It’s a state of being. I’ve called it consumorphosis© — the ongoing transformation of identity, priority, and purpose that defines modern consumer life.
From Function to Feeling
I get it.
It’s easier to fix what’s visible: broken channels, long wait times, confusing messaging, and poor personalisation. And I get that these functional elements are essential. They are table stakes. They build trust.
But trust alone won’t drive preference. Or relevance. Or memory.
The real currency of experience is when we become useful, relevant, or invisible.
That’s emotion, and only emotion encodes memory. And without memory, our brand is nothing.
The coffee you had this morning? Forgotten. But the moment someone made you feel seen, understood, powerful, safe? That sticks.
Motivation Is the Missing Metric
Customer satisfaction isn’t a strategy. It’s a lagging indicator.
We can be satisfied and forgettable. Satisfied and disloyal. Satisfied and indifferent.
What moves people is not satisfaction, but if I can choose one word that captures it holistically, I call it motivation.
Motivation explains why someone chooses you, stays with you, returns to you, talks about you, forgives you, and defends you.
Motivation is emotional, situational, modal and often unspoken.
It’s not “I like this product.”
It’s “This makes me feel like myself.”
Or: “This helps me be who I want to be.”
Or: “This gives me a sense of control.”
Control Economy: Why Agency Is Part of the New Customer Value
In a world defined by complexity, acceleration, and identity fluidity, control—not loyalty, not love—has become the organising principle of modern life.
This ‘control’ comes in two forms: reactive and generative. Most brands today offer reactive control: Dashboards, filters, tools and more that optimise within chaotic systems.
But consumers increasingly crave generative control. They want the ability to shape their environments, express evolving identities, and co-create meaning in a world that often feels unmanageable.
Let’s agree to call it the Control Economy, where value is created not through more content or faster delivery, but through systems that adapt to who a person is becoming in real time. Brands can build “control fluency,” design for dynamic identity states, and enable flow states that drive emotional resonance, cultural relevance, and commercial success.
The brands that will thrive are those that don’t just deliver experiences—they architect agency.
The Architecture of Motivation
Here’s what we know: people act not from static values, but from active motivators, such as:
Standing out or fitting in
Feeling free or feeling safe
Avoiding waste or making progress
Protecting identity or expanding it
Reclaiming time or investing it well
The most important motivators involve time, from efficiency to relief, or time well spent, such as pleasure, or attention. The most powerful is time well invested — when the experience affirms who you are, or want to become.
Amazon doesn’t just make shopping easy. It affirms competence, agency, control.
Starbucks doesn’t just serve coffee. For some, it creates permission for belonging and familiarity.
Nike sells aspiration, not shoes. And it invites you to act like the person who does it anyway.
The Power of Emotional Fit
To design meaningfully, we need to ask:
What job are we being hired to do?
In a world of shifting identities and multiple modes, our brand must behave like a mirror—not a message—not reflecting who people were but amplifying who they are becoming.
And that’s not always the same answer twice.
Your customers may want simplicity and invisibility, transformation and visibility, or both.
Both are valid because both are experiences and emotional.
Stop Optimising. Start Empathising.
We obsess over the measurable. Net Promoter Scores. Conversion rates. Drop-offs.
But what matters more is:
What does this moment mean to the customer?
What are they trying to protect or express?
What version of themselves are they, or are they trying to become?
These aren’t metrics. They’re human truths.
We won’t find them in surveys or on balance sheets because people don’t always say what they feel, don’t always do what they say, or feel what we expect.
As David Ogilvy reminded us, consumers are messy, contradictory, and magnificently illogical.
What Comes Next
We need new capabilities:
Anthropologists, not just analysts
Experience strategists, not just journey mappers
Empathic AI, not just predictive AI
Brands that adapt like people, not just brands that perform
Because the future of consumer experience isn’t about systems that serve brands.
It’s about systems that serve human possibility.
Thank you for reading.
Michael