Sanjay Patney, Chief Growth and Marketing Officer, Union Coop.Walk into any supermarket on a Friday afternoon and you can tell, within a minute, whether the brand is being delivered by the people inside it. The stocked aisles, the staff posture, the till queues, the way a shopper is greeted at fresh produce. None of it is marketing in the textbook sense. All of it is the brand. It explains why the question I am most often asked carries a flawed assumption: how does a business build a customer experience worth having whilst delivering the numbers a board expects this quarter? The orthodoxy treats those as two problems, budgeted and sequenced apart. It is the most expensive habit our industry has yet to break.
For too long, customer experience has been








