You Are the Weirdest Consumer You Know

Switzerland, like most of Europe, has spent a good part of this summer in a heatwave. During it – I’ve counted – I placed a fan or some other cooling device into an online shopping cart at least five separate times. Each time, the same choreography: find the fan, compare a few models, add to cart, feel productive. Then wander the digital aisles a bit more – a cable here, something for the kitchen there. Then look at the total, feel a small familiar twinge – this is getting to be a splurge – and close the tab.

I did not buy the fan. Not once. I own a total of zero fans today.

Let the record show: life in my apartment these past weeks would have been measurably, objectively, thermodynamically better with a fan in it. There were nights I lay awake in the heat, actively not thinking about the five fans I had declined to buy. That takes effort.

Here is what makes this properly embarrassing: understanding customers is part of what I do for a living. I have spent years developing business with various clients. I have led teams of sales professionals. I designed programs that help executives get closer to their customers. I have sat through hours of research debriefs and journey maps, nodded gravely at funnels. And after all that, I cannot give you a rational account of my own shopping cart.

I’ve come to believe this is not a personal failing. It’s possibly the most useful piece of consumer research I have access to – and you have access to the same source, for free, without commissioning anything.

Why customer centricity in 2026 needs another look

Why am I returning to this now? A bit of context, because the timing is not accidental.

At WDHB, we spent much of 2013 to 2018 running programs on consumer and customer centricity. It was the hot conversation in those years. Then the interest subsided. Digital transformation took over the agenda – connected to centricity, certainly, but not the same thing. Then came Covid, and something quietly worse happened: organizations became so busy with themselves – their supply chains, their workplaces, their survival – that many simply forgot about the customer for a few years. Understandably. But forgot nonetheless.

And now the interest is back. In the past two or three years I’ve watched company after company rediscover the consumer — the person who makes their entire world go round, who was supposed to be the center of their universe all along. 

I think consumer centricity is due for a proper reinvention: in the age of AI, obviously, but also — and this is the part I find more interesting — as a reaction to it. The more synthetic our understanding of people becomes, the more valuable the genuine article gets. AI can increasingly reconstruct context. Organizations can now build richer representations of customers than ever before. AI can connect behavioral data, transaction histories, conversations and external context, and infer patterns that no individual analyst could see.

That is enormously valuable. But it also introduces a subtler risk. The better the representation becomes, the easier it is to mistake the representation for the person. AI still cannot simply know what the experience meant to the person living it.

Every reinvention I’ve watched succeed, though, started in the same place. Not with a technology. Not with a framework. With a person actually noticing consumers again. So that’s where I want to start too — with the nearest consumer available: me. And, by the end of this piece, you.

The double life of every executive

Every leader I know lives a double life, and almost none of them notice.

By day, we model the people who buy from us as rational actors. We sort them into segments. We give them persona names and stock photos. We draw funnels in which they progress, sensibly, from awareness to consideration to purchase, weighing attributes and maximizing utility.

By night, we go home and behave like absolute mysteries.

Take loyalty. I am, and my friends and colleagues will confirm this with a sigh, a hopeless case for citizenM hotels. I’ve followed them since the very beginning – my first encounter was in June 2011, on a Learning Expedition, where we got to exchange with co-founder and COO Michael Levie. I love the brand, the operating model, the spirit, the staff. And I keep booking them despite the fact that, by any functional standard, the rooms are a provocation: you cannot open a suitcase on the floor, the desk barely holds a laptop, there is no closet, and the only place to sit is the bed. I know all of this. I book anyway – for the lobby, the scent of the shower gel, the absurd comfort of the mattress. And since citizenM became part of Marriott Bonvoy, I somehow love it even more, which I can assure you is not how loyalty programs are supposed to work on a rational man.

Now take the opposite. In duopolies – exactly where consumers are famously tribal – I refuse to commit. In Switzerland, you are supposed to be a Migros child or a Coop child; the grocery allegiance is practically inherited, like a surname. I’m neither. I switch, happily and often. Same with the other great duopoly: I default to Coke Zero, privately suspect Pepsi Max might actually be the better drink, and will switch every so often, committing to neither.

So on paper, I am simultaneously the most loyal and the least loyal consumer I know: irrationally faithful to a hotel room with no closet, irrationally faithless in the categories where fidelity is the national norm. Good luck segmenting me.

And here is the uncomfortable part. If a customer behaved the way I behave, our models would classify them as noise. An outlier. An irrational actor to be averaged away.

We have built entire analytical machines whose quiet assumption is that our own behavior — yours, mine, everyone’s in the leadership meeting – is not valid input.

Your weirdness is not noise. It’s the signal.

The standard conclusion at this point is that consumers are irrational. It’s the wrong conclusion, and you can prove it to yourself without leaving your own head.

The fan was never about the money. Somewhere in my mental accounting, a cooling device is filed under “splurge”, while the same amount spent on a dinner would pass without a second thought. A comfort I had never owned felt optional.. That’s not irrational; it’s a filing system. A weird one, but a system.

citizenM is not about the room. I’m not buying square meters, which is lucky, because there aren’t any. I’m buying membership in a story I’ve watched being built since 2011, a brand whose founder I’ve sat across from, a set of sensory anchors – that lobby, that scent, that mattress – that tell me I’ve arrived somewhere I belong. The “restrictions” don’t count against the experience because they were never what I was purchasing.

And the switching is not indecision. It’s autonomy – a small, private refusal of the tribal script, plus the simple pleasure of variety. The inconsistency is the preference.

Consumers are not irrational. They are rational about different things: identity, memory, guilt, comfort, autonomy, story. The decisions only look strange when you hold them against the wrong rationality – the tidy, attribute-weighing economist we keep assuming into existence.

And here is the leadership point hiding inside the joke: you have first-person, always-on, unfiltered access to exactly this other rationality. It runs in you every day, on full display. No focus group will ever get you closer to how a real decision actually feels from the inside than your own last strange purchase – or your own last strange non-purchase. The most honest consumer lab you will ever visit is your own week.

Plug into yourself: a two-week experiment

So here is a practice I’d genuinely recommend, precisely because it’s slightly uncomfortable and costs nothing.

For two weeks, keep a consumer diary. Not of your customers, but of yourself.

1. Note every purchase you make, and every near-purchase: the cart you abandoned, the thing you almost bought, the upgrade you hovered over.

2. For each one, write a single sentence: what story did I tell myself? Not the official reason. The story. (“I deserved it.” “This would be splurging.” “Everyone serious uses this one.”)

3. Mark the moments where emotion made the decision and reason wrote the explanation afterwards. You will find more of these than you expect. Possibly all of them.

4. At the end of each week, ask the killer question: what would my own company’s dashboard have recorded about me this week — and what would it have completely missed?

That last question is the whole exercise. A dashboard would have seen five abandoned carts. A sophisticated system might have connected them to a heatwave and inferred hesitation or price sensitivity. What it could not know for certain is the guilt, the story I was telling myself: that buying a fan counted as a splurge. It would have seen an unsegmentable grocery shopper with no brand loyalty; it would have missed that the switching is the loyalty — to my own autonomy.

What changes when a leader has felt this

I want to be careful here, because this is where the piece could go soft, and it shouldn’t. This is not an empathy exercise in the greeting-card sense. Something specific and practical changes in a leader who has genuinely noticed their own consumer weirdness.

They stop asking “why don’t customers behave?” – a question that quietly blames the customer for the model’s failure – and start asking a much better question: “what is my organization unable to sense?”

You can watch the difference in meetings. Leaders who have felt their own irrationality treat personas as sketches, not people. They get suspicious of averages, because they know they are not average themselves — no one is; the average customer is a mathematical convenience who has never bought anything. They give qualitative signal standing in the room, because they know from the inside that the reasons that matter rarely survive translation into a five-point scale. They ask what the data would have missed about them, and then wonder, out loud, what it’s missing about everyone else.

The customer stops being an abstraction, because the leader has stopped being one.

From insight to capability

And yet – I have to be honest about the limitation, because it’s the reason this piece has a sequel.

A reflex that lives in one leader’s head is not much of a system. It is not an organizational capability. It leaves the building every evening. It gets overruled by quarterly pressure. Eventually it retires, or resigns, or simply gets tired.

Noticing your own weirdness is where consumer understanding starts — it is emphatically not where it scales. What it takes to move that reflex out of a person and into an operating model — into the decisions, systems, and habits that keep working when nobody is paying attention — is a different question.

It’s the one I want to take on next.