Earlier this year, Forrester’s Priorities Survey, 2025, collected data among 4,519 global private sector business and technology professionals across many different industries.
We asked them a simple question: “Which of the following objectives will be your organisation’s most important business priorities over the next 12 months?”
The top three priorities were:
Improve the experience of our end customers (60%).
Achieve growth targets (58%).
Improve brand (53%).
These three priorities are tightly linked, with both customer experience (CX) and brand vital to driving growth. And success requires tight alignment across functions.
Marketers are often wrongly perceived as overfocusing on acquisition, media, advertising, and promotion. But acquisition is the lifeblood of most companies, fueling revenue and business growth. Marketers are also tasked with creating memorable brand experiences. After all, consumers experience your brand whether you build it intentionally or not.
CX professionals, you are already thinking about how to build an awesome customer experience. You recognise the importance of serving customers well to create stickiness, retain customers, and monetise the relationship over time.
When companies improve both brand equity and CX together, there is a significant revenue uplift. We analyzed the relationship between creating brand equity and solidifying this brand perception through experiences that serve customers and found that both brand experience (BX) and CX not only act as powerful drivers of business value but also have a compounding effect: up to 3.5x higher revenue impact.
Delivering the promises you made fuels your growth engine.
How do you do this? By delivering a total experience.
The total experience shapes the perception that consumers (prospects and customers) form based on their cumulative interactions with your brand. It’s not fixed. It’s fluid — shaping and evolving over time as consumers continuously recalibrate their expectations based on their experiences.
Consistent, additive, anticipatory — these are the three principles that make up a total experience mindset:
Consistent. When brands deliver consistent experiences, they become reliable. Consumers expect something from them, and they keep delivering that thing each time. Consistent experiences across CX and BX feel unified and connected, where the tone or message of the brand aligns to the actions it takes or services it delivers.
Additive. Additive experiences build over time, and they take context into account. They build upon a consumer’s experience with the brand, so interactions feel like a continuation of the relationship, not a reset. They use data to adapt the experience as the consumer evolves.
Anticipatory. When a brand delivers anticipatory experiences, they read the moment and flex based on real-time customer signals. Anticipatory experiences leverage predictive analytics to anticipate consumer needs and delivers a message, service, product, or experience before they even ask for it.
Now, the real magic happens when all three of these principles come together, and a brand fully adopts a total experience mindset.
Join Us At CX Summit EMEA 2025 To Learn More
To learn more about how to power growth with your total experience, join us at CX Summit EMEA on June 2–4, 2025, in London. I am delighted to deliver the opening keynote of our event “The Total Experience: Your Brand, Their Journey.”
The Summit brings together leaders in CX, digital, and marketing to explore the future of customer relationships and learn how to build a total experience that aligns brand experience and CX to drive sustainable growth.
You’ll be able to learn Forrester experts but also many inspiring guest speakers — CEOs, chief experience officers, chief client officers, and chief digital officers from leading brands like Bank Of Ireland, Bupa, Lloyds Banking Group, Fujitsu, Philips International, and many more.
We also have special programmes for you such as an AI Hackathon, an Executive Leadership Exchange (a curated experience for C-level executives), as well as Forrester Women’s Leadership Programme and our CX Certification course.
You can deep dive into critical topics with track sessions organised around three themes:
Leverage Tech For Stellar CX — And EX
Optimise Journey Value With Data
Empower The People That Make Great Experiences
You can explore the full agenda and register here.
If you are a Forrester client, stay tuned for additional research on the total experience and Forrester’s upcoming Total Experience Score. Go to my Forrester bio and click “Follow” to be notified. You can also follow me on LinkedIn here.
Also, as a client, you can schedule time with me for an inquiry or guidance session or talk to your account team about workshops and strategy days on how to align your brand, customer, and employee experiences.
