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Greg Kilstrom
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Greg Kilstrom
hi, I'm Greg Kilstrom, host of the Agile Brand, and here's a question for you. If a brand is no longer what a company says it is, but the sum of every experience a customer has, what does that mean for the marketing department's role in the organization? Agility requires more than just adapting to market changes. It demands a fundamental shift from broadcasting a message to engineering an experience. It requires a willingness to unlearn old definitions of brand and embrace a new reality where customer perception is the ultimate truth. Today we're going to talk about what some are calling a reformation in branding to move away from the traditional model of logos, slogans and campaigns, and toward a new understanding where the brand is the cumulative effect of every single customer interaction. This shift has massive implications for organizational structure, strategy, and even how we measure success. Welcome to Season eight of the Agile Brand Podcast. This season we're going all in on expert mode, martech, AI and customer experience, talking with the people and platforms behind the brands you know and love. Again, I'm your host Greg Kilstrom and I help Fortune 1000 companies make sense of martech, AI and marketing ops. Hit subscribe or follow to make sure you always get the latest episodes and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. And make sure you check out our sponsor, Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services, and real world adoption. For more information, go to techsystems.com now let's dive in to help me discuss these topics. I'd like to welcome Lou Carbone, professor of Practice, Michigan State University and Founder Chief Experience Officer at Experience Engineering. Lou welcome to the show, Greg.
Lou Carbone
Thank you so much for having me on. I'm looking forward to the discussion. Thank you.
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Looking forward to talking about this with you before we dive in. I know many are probably familiar with your work, but why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at Experience Engineering?
Lou Carbone
Actually, my background started many years ago as a journalist, actually interviewing an imagineer, the last imagineer hired by Disney. From that, I went on into advertising and marketing with a number of agencies and had the great fortune through two of those agencies to be assigned to Disney, representing participants and what people refer to as experiential intelligence. Looking at Disney and being around it, both on the inside and the outside, led me to a deeper understanding of brand ethos. And brand ethos is sort of that feeling that an organization isn't a company, it's an institution. Mayo Clinic shares that same feeling Starbucks had. I think they started to lose some of that patina and are now coming back to understanding what brand ethos is. And that is literally how you cause people to feel about themselves. And it is that transformational piece of what it means to me and how it becomes part of me. And the evolution of branding started with trying to identify product. If we go back to branding cows and so on. And so one of the things that's so important is to unlearn the things that we've learned to be able to discover and to grow and to evolve things. And I think that brand has changed a great deal from the way that it was traditionally seen.
Greg Kilstrom
So I think that's a great segue to where I wanted to start, which is really looking at this idea of brand from that strategic lens. And your work certainly calls for a reformation in how we think about brand as well as. As how we think about experience. You mentioned some iconic brands, you know, Disney, Starbucks, others just now. And, you know, but not all brands are certainly even close to achieving the kind of the definition and some other things that those brands have achieved. In this model you describe, you know, if the experience is the brand, what's the single biggest mindset shift that an exec needs to make to begin this journey?
Lou Carbone
Oh, it is so huge. It's moving out of the industrial age and understanding that in the industrial age, we created silos. We created the idea that we control the brand. And it's really consumers who do. We're not making a product what we're doing. When we create an experience, which is what a brand is all about. The currency of experience is memories. So the industry did what it always did, which was built out of quality, which is how do we eliminate defects versus how do we create distinctive value. And everybody thinks, oh, we gotta get the basics down. And if you aim that low, you'll be there Forever. You'll be commoditized. What you have to do is get into the mind of the consumer and travel through the maze of their mind and understand unconscious thought, how emotions are formed. And then you embed those clues and signals that actually build that brand ethos in terms of what they're unconscious needs are. That's something that we published on almost four decades ago. And what ended up happening is I love the work that Joe and Jim Bielmore have done. I mean, they popularized the construct of value markets. What was never presented was how we need to think differently. And our article actually preceded theirs by about four or five years. Years. But what they talked about was basically theater at Disney. Well, there's a whole science beyond that. The science of theater is memory. It's emotion. And yet there was never any real understanding. So then what we did is created a profession, and it took off like crazy. And I thank Bruce and Jeanne Bliss and the association for recognizing that this is a profession. And it was my. I. I was the first chief experience officer, probably globally. We started the very first company that was ever dedicated. But to me, the CEO is ultimately the chief experience officer. Instead, it got relegated to a profession of departmental safekeeping of measurements and metrics to create. Oh, I don't want to call it an alibi, but to create justification for everything else that's going on in the company. But no control over it.
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah.
Lou Carbone
And so people hold these departments responsible for roi, and yet if someone in another department raises prices, what are we looking at? So the only thing that I believe is you look at what customer experience can control, and that's what you measure.
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I've often thought, too, that to me, customer experience seems like a. Rather than a vertical item in an org chart, it seems like a horizontal. If there's a chief experience officer, that's great to own that. But customer experience, it extends all the way throughout the organization. Right.
Lou Carbone
Throughout the organization and even beyond our contact with a customer. When we did work with Progressive Auto Insurance, if you had done traditional journey mapping and not gotten into the mind of the customer. Journey mapping, and many journey mappers really have tried to evolve, but it's really looking at process.
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah.
Lou Carbone
And process is not what it's about. When we did work with Progressive, we realized the most vulnerable moment in a claim was at the moment of impact and created the instant response vehicles that showed up on the scene of the accident with a claims adjuster. In traditional thought, if you're. You'd say, oh, it starts with the call. The claims are now online and what we need to understand is that a journey is not a beginning and an end, it's a continuum. In our work and include in and in the articles that we've published for decades, we talk about an experience ribbon that goes around and around and around and the depth of that covers sensory aspects and emotions and not things that happen that are functional only
Greg Kilstrom
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Greg Kilstrom
I mean it seems like
Lou Carbone
even the
Greg Kilstrom
things that you are mentioning are measurable, but it seems like a lot of the dysfunction I'll just call it is due to Is it that people tend to fall towards what's easy to measure and easy to make a process around? Is that where brands get stuck?
Lou Carbone
I think that I hate to say this, but I'm beginning to think of LinkedIn and all of what social media has done to the fractionalization of the industry has become a cesspool of people trying to make money, which is nothing wrong with but without advancing thinking and there are so many self proclaimed experts there's no science to back it up in terms of what they're doing other than borrowed from quality, borrowed from service and we're into a new era and a really, really new era with AI. And we even misunderstand AI and think that it's something that we hang on and bolt onto. What we're doing versus AI is the central nervous system of a human system. And the human system is an engineered experience. It's the fusion of the technology of understanding human dynamics and technology in terms of artificial intelligence. So that's the work that we've been doing. I've got, I guess, three new books coming out. One is the Currency of Experience is Memory. Another is called Fusionomics. And I don't want to plug books, but I feel this overwhelming need after four decades of waiting for the world to begin to realize that. I ended the book with the Road Less Traveled and invited people on the Road Less Traveled, which was discovery. It was about unlearning and it was learning new ways to create value in the economy at the turn of the decade. And unfortunately, people came on board and did what they were always doing and called it something different.
Greg Kilstrom
Right, Right. So I mean, if, how, how do, how should brands do this? Right, that, you know, they're, they're gonna need to, they're gonna need to measure effectiveness and prove roi. And you know, you're not saying not to do that, of course, but like, what's the, what is the right way? Because I agree with you. I think there's a lot of, you know, I'm sure well intentioned people that are also trying to, you know, make a living and stuff like that, but not necessarily steering the conversation in, in the right way around how brands should be thinking about experience. So, you know, how do you marry that need for, for ROI with the need to actually make a great experience?
Lou Carbone
Absolutely. And there are some absolutes. The first absolute is being inside the mind of the customer, walking the maze of the mind of the customer and beginning to understand unconscious needs rather than. And what that is, is understanding how customers think versus what they think. There's a big difference between the two. The second is then becoming aware of what that emotional keyhole is that unlocks that brand ethos, that feeling that if that company went away tomorrow, my life would be different. I would mourn the loss of that company. And then creating the key. And the key is the way the human brain operates, which is there are signals that we pick up, which I call experience clues. They're humanic, mechanic, and functional. And how do we manage those to create that emotional resonance? And then how do we measure? And we've been doing this for a While now all of this unconscious work, my work with Jerry Z. Altman over the years and using all these distinctive new techniques, and when I teach at Michigan State, I'm teaching people how to think differently, how to unlearn what we've learned in market research and qualitative research, because there's so much more to the world than focus groups and opinions to really in depth understanding. So then from that what we want to do is measure emotional congruency. Are we actually creating those needs? If we're doing that, we will flourish. An example that I use is a barbershop that I love that gave me a horrible haircut the first time I went there. But I go back there again and again and again. It's called Truford and Hill, and it's how they made me feel. They gave me tea, they shined my shoes. The one that I went to was in Canada, but they're out of London. And I even got a shave. I was so taken by the experience. And when I left, I was transformed. I felt like a phenomenal person because every clue, every element was how I would feel. And whenever I'm in London or in Toronto or wherever they have a franchise, I'll go in there for a haircut. But they fell down on the first haircut. It wasn't the best haircut I ever got right, but it's how it caused me to feel. So I think people are more forgiving when there's emotional ethos built into a brand.
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Yeah.
Greg Kilstrom
And so, you know, you mentioned some extreme example. You mentioned a barbershop and you mentioned Disney in this conversation. So, you know, the natural question is, you know, are there parts of this like, does this apply to every brand? And, you know, or like, how does a, you know, how does a brand that isn't maybe so obviously experiential apply some of these and still, you know, and still adapt.
Lou Carbone
I think it's very simple. And I blame it on the industry. I don't think that the industry, everyone is so concerned about presenting themselves as an expert that they pull from what they know. What we don't know, what we don't even know we don't know, is the most powerful thing that we can bring to our work. And yet everybody is so concerned about presenting themselves as an expert that they latch onto what's comfortable. Discovery and innovation comes from a lack of comfortability. And what we need to do is prove to organizations that there's a different way to think. There are absolutes in terms of optimizing the value of experiences and the methodology and tools to create that transformative experience that begins to build brand ethos.
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Greg Kilstrom
So, you know, I know I asked some questions about measurement. You know, I wonder your perspective on. I feel like there's been a lot of pressure in recent years from the CEOs to show ROI on the customer experience profession. I mean, is that helping or hurting or both? The profession.
Lou Carbone
It's hurting. Oh, it's hurting because there are people that think that if they've achieved this number and we're in a race and people are competitive, the worst thing that could have happened was putting an S on there. It's an S word. It's score. Who gives a damn about a score? It's. Does it ring the damn cash register?
Greg Kilstrom
Right, Right.
Lou Carbone
And it doesn't. And people are so obsessed with the score because it's justification. And then they complain that there was no return on the investment. Are we crazy?
Greg Kilstrom
Right. Right. It's chasing measurement at the expense of results. Yeah. Right.
Lou Carbone
Yeah. I mean, when I see how this industry got so corrupted from what my vision was and what my vision is, the work that we did 40 years ago is what we need to be grasping onto today is understanding that experiences are, are engineered. They can be engineered to create emotional ethos. And yet what we're doing is fixing broken stuff. We're paying attention to scores. We're journey mapping, which, you know, and even the net promoter score. The question how many years before, I mean, decades before, when I was A VP of Marketing at National Car. We had a question on that survey that said, would you recommend, Would you come back again? That's baloney. I want to measure whether you actually did. I'd rather pay you to refer someone. And it's getting so corrupted that I hung up yesterday on a call
Guest or Call Participant
that
Lou Carbone
I believe was with either Microsoft or Capital One. At the end of the conversation, I got what used to happen in the automotive industry with JD Power. If I get anything less than a 10, you're going to be asked, because I said you did an absolutely fantastic job, which you did. But then he pandered the score. What we're doing is we're inhaling exhaust fumes from a car in this profession and don't realize that we're taking in carbon monoxide, which will kill you.
Greg Kilstrom
Right, right.
Lou Carbone
What we need is freshness and oxygen. And that's what the reformation is all about.
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah.
Lou Carbone
And it's bringing people together. And the problem I see is bringing the experts together to create a consolidated view of the future of this work. And I'm willing to debate and concede or do whatever, but let's work together rather than having a whole bunch of self promotion going on in this space.
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, agreed. So, you know, as, as we wrap up here, got a couple things for you. You did, you briefly mentioned AI. Gotta, gotta get to that at least briefly here. You know, I wonder your take on this and certainly, you know, there's, there's a lot of hype. I've, I've seen some, some real tangible results as well. You know, how is, how is AI going to change customer experience and maybe how is it not going to change it?
Lou Carbone
Yeah. What is ironic is that Stephen Haeckel, who recently passed away, was my co author in the seminal article in the space on managing experiences and a methodology for it. We started to write another book because Steve wrote the Adaptive Enterprise. He was a futurist at IBM. He was actually the Director of Strategic Studies at the Advanced Business Institute where I was an adjunct faculty member. And we wrote this article, we started to write a book and one of the chapters was the Future of Work. This was back 30, 40 years ago and Steve wrote a great Harvard Business Review article called Managing by Wire back then. And it was when IBM was playing around with Watson and we could see what was going to happen. And it's why Steve and I got together because the tenants under engineering experiences is a science. AI is a science also in terms of prompts and it isn't an add on it needs to be central to an operating system that is human, which is the ability to engineer experiences so it isn't a bolt on. The bolt ons are terrible. And people that are experimenting with agenic AI. I must have 30 bots a day that I'm now like, these are flies almost. It's like, boom, I got another one and bam, another one. The thing that happens is when you begin to look at adoption of technology, even the Internet, AI in the, I think it was in the first week had over a half a million users within days.
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, chatgpt. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lou Carbone
Now if you look at the adoption of the video tape recorder, it's like seven or eight years before families. So in this rapid movement of discontinuous change is what Steve's whole body of work that we started to expand into. The fusion of human experience with AI was the idea of the adaptive enterprise and that companies are ultimately customer driven and people talk about customer centricity. What we need to be able to do is drive what customers desire. And there are three levels of desire. First level is basic human needs. And we overlook that because we immediately go to the next level, which is cultural differences and segmentation is huge. But what we're not fulfilling is basic human needs. Sort of the hierarchy of human needs. And now we're going to start doing the top of that pyramid of experiences which is individualized. What we need to do is build each of those on top of one another and it's a system. And that's the other problem is it's systems thinking that ultimately the business, every business is in the business of creating an experience, whether they like it or not. The expression that I'm best known for that is a double negative is that you cannot not have an experience. It's a question of how managed or how haphazard that experience is.
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah. Love it. Well, Lou, thanks so much for joining today. One last question for you as we wrap up. Like to ask this to everybody. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Lou Carbone
What is so important to me is continuing to learn what I taught in this qualitative research course. As I said, I am not going to spend a lot of time on tools and techniques. What greatest gift I can give you as students is how to think as a researcher. And as a researcher, you need to be curious, you need to discover and you need to interpret what you've discovered and be uncomfortable with what you actually uncover. And there isn't anything that's going to take that away because AI is always going to be looking backward.
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah. Yeah.
Lou Carbone
And what we have to do is to be able to predict and project the future. And the only way to do that is to have the mind of researchers in qualitative research. So the entire semester was really built around how to think differently, how to be open minded. And also I think it's probably one of the few times someone taught a course that said, here's how you sell open mindedness and how you sell this work to executives that are living in the industrial age.
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, love that.
Lou Carbone
That's how I keep busy teaching, moving along with clients on Experience Engineering and the Experience Reformation.
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, love it, love it. Well, Louis, it was great talking with you. Would love to continue this conversation. We'll have to have you back on the show, but thanks again for joining.
Lou Carbone
Oh, thank you. I think you can tell that I'm passionate.
Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Lou Carbone
I've lived this, it's been my life and I've watched so much and observed so much and discovered so much. And I thank you so much for the opportunity to be able to express these thoughts and feelings. I think they're so critical. And if I were to die and go to my grave and not see what potential we saw in the constructs that we first saw before the industry went on the road often taken, join us on the road less traveled.
Greg Kilstrom
Love that. Well again, I'd like to thank Lou Carbone, professor of Practice, Michigan State University and Founder, Chief Experience Officer at Experience Engineering for joining the show. You can learn more about Lou and Experience Engineering by following the links in the show notes. This episode is brought to you by Tech Systems. They're leaders in full stack tech services, talent solutions and helping companies put it all in action. You can learn more@techsystems.com that's teksystems.com and thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand podcast. If you like the episode, hit subscribe and drop a rating so others can find the show too. And if you're interested in consulting, advisory work, or if you need a speaker for your next event, feel free to reach out. Just visit GregKilstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
Lou Carbone
The Agile Brand.
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Podcast: The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
Guest: Lou Carbone (Professor of Practice, Michigan State University; Founder & Chief Experience Officer, Experience Engineering)
Host: Greg Kihlström
Episode Date: July 20, 2026
This episode delves into the evolving definition of "brand" in the modern era, where customer experience (CX)—not just logos, slogans, or messaging—truly defines a brand's impact and value. Host Greg Kihlström interviews Lou Carbone, a pioneer in experience engineering, for a deep, candid discussion about unlearning traditional marketing approaches, re-imagining ROI and measurement, and preparing CX strategies for an AI-driven future.
[00:47–04:51]
Brand as Experience:
Brand Ethos & Emotional Impact:
"Brand ethos is literally how you cause people to feel about themselves...it's transformational." (Lou Carbone, 03:50)
Evolution of Branding:
[04:51–09:12]
"We created the idea that we control the brand. And it's really consumers who do." (Lou Carbone, 05:43)
[09:12–11:14]
[12:53–15:33, 22:01–25:16]
Measuring What’s Easy vs. What Matters:
"The industry has become a cesspool of people trying to make money...without advancing thinking." (Lou Carbone, 13:20)
ROI & The Score Fallacy:
"Who gives a damn about a score? It's...does it ring the damn cash register?" (Lou Carbone, 22:45)
[16:15–19:21]
Empathy, Emotion, and ‘Experience Clues’:
"There's a big difference between understanding how customers think versus what they think." (Lou Carbone, 16:25)
Forgiveness Rooted in Emotional Connection:
[19:22–20:57]
[25:50–30:32]
AI as Fundamental, Not Add-on:
"AI is the central nervous system of a human system...the fusion of the technology of understanding human dynamics and technology in terms of artificial intelligence." (Lou Carbone, 13:45)
Rapid Change and Systems Thinking:
"Every business is in the business of creating an experience, whether they like it or not." (Lou Carbone, 29:26)
[30:49–32:22]
Staying Curious and Uncomfortable:
"As a researcher, you need to be curious, you need to discover and you need to interpret what you’ve discovered and be uncomfortable with what you actually uncover." (Lou Carbone, 30:54)
Promoting and Selling Open-Mindedness:
“Brand ethos is literally how you cause people to feel about themselves…it's transformational.”
— Lou Carbone [03:50]
“We created the idea that we control the brand. And it's really consumers who do.”
— Lou Carbone [05:43]
"The industry has become a cesspool…without advancing thinking."
— Lou Carbone [13:20]
"Who gives a damn about a score? It's…does it ring the damn cash register?"
— Lou Carbone [22:45]
"Every business is in the business of creating an experience, whether they like it or not."
— Lou Carbone [29:26]
"You cannot not have an experience. It's a question of how managed or how haphazard that experience is."
— Lou Carbone [29:42]
“As a researcher, you need to be curious… and be uncomfortable with what you actually uncover.”
— Lou Carbone [30:54]
Lou Carbone advocates a fundamental re-imagining of brand and CX—from logo-centric marketing to holistic, emotionally resonant experience engineering. He urges listeners (and brands) to reject superficial measurement and siloed thinking, to deeply understand customer emotions, and to embrace AI as a central facilitator—not an add-on. Agility, innovation, and true brand value come from curiosity, discovery, and always being willing to question what you think you know.
For more on Lou Carbone and Experience Engineering, see links in the show notes.