By Ian Baer, Founder & CEO, Sooth
The collapse of a market-leading brand doesn’t begin with disloyal customers, deceptive competitors, product failures, service hiccups, data breaches, Gen Z disruptions, or any of the other scapegoats that have led to the performance tailspin so many brands find themselves facing today. These are not imaginary villains but symptoms of the same systemic issue: well-meaning people making decisions in the dark.
The storyline is eerily similar when assessing some of the biggest brand implosions of recent years – from Starbucks to Verizon, Target, Airbnb, and more. They all had more than enough data to target consumers with complex marketing systems. They all had the latest tech. Sharp CRM strategies. Innovative products. Deep pockets that allowed them to make bold choices and pivot on a dime when they had to.
But without emotional clarity, they were all flying blind — and by the time they realized it, the erosion was already too deep to fix. Verizon didn’t fall from #1 in their category to #3 because they had a weaker network, just as T-Mobile didn’t take their place atop the category because they had better technology. T-Mobile won because they clearly understood the emotional resentment category customers felt, and Verizon didn’t.
Starbucks, Target, Verizon, and the others each made similar mistakes. They acted like market leaders of a bygone era, moving boldly and aggressively, while completely losing the emotional script with their customers. At the same time, Dunkin’, Walmart, and T-Mobile invested in customer understanding and used that knowledge to significantly steal market share in their categories. While Target has seen their foot traffic decline each month for the past year, and Verizon has traded places with a former second-tier competitor, the evidence is clear from category to category that the brands who understand the true motivations of their customers best will continue to outperform those who rely on demographics, transactional data, and their ability to outspend the competition. And once a competitor locks in that emotional connection with a customer that another brand strategized and spent serious money to acquire, no amount of innovation, data, or operational excellence can save them.
But the losses don’t show up in the revenue lines first. They show up in declining loyalty, silent exits, and minimal advocacy until one day the ground gives out, and that customer is gone forever. Without a complaint or a warning, they disappear without a trace — just another digit in the latest churn report.
Every leadership mistake looks like a success until it doesn’t. For decades as an agency head, I sat in boardrooms with brilliant leaders believing they were making all the right moves, according to the people, reports, and management dashboards in front of them. Brand research teams and agency leads focused mainly on the good news and minimized the bad to keep the trains running on time. But the emotional truth behind the numbers was nearly always missing. There was no time for the extent of research required to move with emotional intelligence. There wasn’t a budget for careful measurement to know which 20% of marketing investments were driving all the results, and which 80% amounted to pouring buckets of cash out of the window.
A decade ago, most experts and analysts predicted that “customer centricity” would fix and redefine everything. Brands, agencies, and service providers spent billions of dollars building elaborate tech stacks to target customers, track behavior, optimize media, and maximize efficiency. But they never built the infrastructure to truly understand people — their true needs. As loyalty fractured faster, customer expectations shifted harder, and markets demanded more human connection. Almost overnight, the absence of that infrastructure turned into an existential risk.
Good marketers and business leaders make bad decisions every second of every day. Not because they’re not intelligent, but because the systems designed to assist them cannot understand their customers’ emotional and real-life experiences. They wrongly categorize emotional intelligence and clarity as soft skills when, in fact, these have become the foundation of strong financial results. Recent research from Bain, Deloitte, and McKinsey consistently shows that companies leading with emotional intelligence and human connection significantly outperform their competitors, with customer lifetime value increasing by three to five times, and loyalty growth occurring up to three times faster, particularly in volatile markets. They are less vulnerable to competitive strikes, recover quicker from downturns, and command more substantial margins — even in volatile markets.
Companies that have missed this shift aren’t just losing market share — their entire business valuations are bleeding out in each day’s headlines.
The future of leadership won’t be defined by how fast you can process yesterday’s data. It will be determined by how clearly you can see what people need next —emotionally, practically, and situationally — before the rest of the world even notices.
The companies that act with emotional clarity now won’t just survive.
They’ll own the future.
