That was the vibe in the boardroom on Wednesday, a room filled with people who confuse a lack of friction with the presence of love. I sat there, having tried to go to bed at nine p.m. the night before and failing miserably because my brain decided to inventory every mistake I’ve made since , watching a slide deck celebrate ‘loyalty’ that was actually just ‘inertia.’
We were looking at a chart of people who were likely standing in a terminal, juggling a suitcase and a half-eaten pretzel, choosing us because we were the only option that didn’t require them to remember a password they made in .
Fig 1. The “Hockey Stick” of Inertia – Reporting convenience as if it were preference.
We call it customer lifetime value. We should probably call it the Path of Least Resistance Index.
Bridges, Toll Booths, and Sharks
It’s a quiet transition. You start by solving a real problem-traveling is stressful, roaming is expensive-and you build a bridge. But eventually, you stop looking at the bridge and start looking at the toll booth. If the toll booth is busy, you assume the bridge is beautiful.
You forget that people might be crossing it only because the alternative is swimming through shark-infested waters with a laptop bag over their heads. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this through the lens of my friend Iris L., a sand sculptor who works on the beaches of the south coast.
“Sand without water is just a pile of potential. Too much water and it’s soup. You need that perfect middle ground where surface tension holds the grains together.”
— Iris L., Sand Sculptor
Iris will tell you, usually while picking grit out of a thermos of lukewarm tea, that it’s actually about the water. But here’s the thing Iris taught me: that tension is temporary. The sun is always working against you. The wind is always working against you.
If the only thing holding your castle together is the fact that the sand is damp, you don’t have a castle. You have a countdown. Most digital businesses today are building damp sandcastles and calling the capillary bridges ‘brand loyalty.’
They’ve optimized the ‘dampness’-the saved credit card, the one-tap checkout, the pre-filled form-to such an extent that the customer doesn’t even feel like they’re making a choice. And if they aren’t making a choice, they aren’t a fan. They’re just stuck.
I used to be a true believer in the “frictionless” gospel. I spent three years arguing that every additional click was a tax on the human soul. I was convinced that if we could just make the transaction invisible, we would achieve a sort of commercial nirvana. I was wrong. I was fundamentally, embarrassingly wrong.
The Uber Paradox in Edinburgh
Take the travel industry. If you are landing in London or heading up to Edinburgh, your primary concern is not the ‘brand story’ of your data provider. Your concern is ‘can I call an Uber before I freeze?’ In that moment of high-stress utility, a saved account is a godsend.
You tap once, you get your UK eSIM, and you move on with your life. The business looks at that transaction and records it as a win for brand affinity. They think, “They came back to us! They love our marketplace!”
In reality, the customer was just trying to survive the transition from the airplane cabin to the train platform. If a competitor had been two seconds faster or had their card details instead, the customer would have gone there without a second thought. The ‘loyalty’ was nothing more than the absence of effort.
This is the hidden danger of modern growth metrics. When you optimize for the cost of staying rather than the reasons for staying, your own instruments go blind.
The event log cannot tell the difference between a person who thinks your service is the best in the world and a person who is too tired to enter their sixteen-digit Visa number into a different app. On the chart, both events look identical. They are both ‘Returning Users.’ They both contribute to the LTV. They both make the board of directors smile.
But internally, the company starts to rot. Because the team stops asking, “How can we make this better?” and starts asking, “How can we make it harder to leave?”
They stop innovating on the core value-the data speeds, the coverage in the Scottish Highlands, the price per gigabyte-and start innovating on the ‘lock-in.’ They focus on the saved payment methods and the ‘remind me later’ buttons.
🌱 Core Innovation
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✓ Better Highlands Coverage
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✓ Transparent Pricing
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✓ Human Support
🔒 Adhesion Lock-in
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✕ Hidden “Cancel” Buttons
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✕ Forced Account Creation
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✕ Saved Payment Friction
The pivot from value creation to barrier construction is a slow-motion decay.
When Masterpieces Liquefy
This switch is usually invisible from the inside. It’s like a slow-motion decay. You’re hitting your targets, your retention is up, and your cost per acquisition is falling. Everything looks perfect. But outside, the customers are growing resentful.
They feel the ‘stickiness’ not as a benefit, but as a trap. They stay because it’s easy, but they’re looking for a way out. They are waiting for someone to offer them a reason to leave that outweighs the convenience of staying.
Iris once told me about a sculpture she spent fourteen hours on. It was a massive, intricate thing-a dragon curled around a lighthouse. People were taking photos, kids were staring in awe. Then the tide started coming in. Not the big waves, just the little ones that lick at the base of the mound.
Because she had relied so much on the moisture content of the sand to hold the weight of the dragon’s wings, the moment the base got slightly too wet, the whole thing didn’t just erode-it liquefied. It went from a masterpiece to a grey puddle in about ninety seconds. The weight of the structure was its own undoing once the ‘adhesion’ failed.
The UK market is crowded. You’ve got the big carriers, the local MVNOs, and the digital marketplaces. The difference between a 10 GB plan and a 20 GB plan is a commodity. The difference between 4G and 5G is a commodity.
The only thing that isn’t a commodity is how a customer feels when they use the service. Do they feel like they’re being looked after, or do they feel like they’re being processed?
If a traveler uses a service to get their data sorted for a trip to the Lake District, and the experience is so seamless they don’t even remember the name of the company, that’s a victory for UX but a failure for brand. It’s the ultimate paradox: the more ‘frictionless’ you make it, the more forgettable you become.
🚰
Water in Pipes
🔌
Electricity in Walls
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Forgettable Data
You’ve optimized yourself into anonymity. You’ve become a utility. People only notice you when you stop working. Utilities are bought on price and availability. They aren’t loved. They aren’t defended.
Building the Stone Wall
If we want to build something that lasts, we have to be willing to introduce a little bit of intentional friction. We have to ask the customer to engage with us, even if it costs us a few percentage points on the conversion rate.
We have to give them a reason to choose us that has nothing to do with their saved credit card. Maybe it’s better information about coverage in rural Wales. Maybe it’s a customer support team that actually speaks like a human being instead of a script. Maybe it’s just being honest about when a plan isn’t the right fit for them.
These things create ‘real’ loyalty. They create the kind of adhesion that doesn’t evaporate when the sun comes out or the tide comes in. It’s the difference between a sandcastle and a stone wall. One is held together by surface tension; the other is held together by the fact that the pieces actually fit.
I’m still tired from my failed early night. I’m still thinking about that boardroom meeting and the cheers for the hockey-stick graph. I keep seeing the dragon liquefying on the beach.
The tide does not care how high you built the dragon if the dragon is held together by nothing but the dampness of the morning.
It’s easy to get lost in the data. It’s easy to believe the numbers because they’re comfortable and they justify our bonuses. But numbers are just shadows. They tell you where the light is coming from, but they don’t tell you what the object is made of.
You have to go outside, you have to talk to the people standing in the rain at the bus stop, trying to get their maps to load. You have to see the frustration in their eyes when the ‘convenient’ solution fails them.
Loyalty isn’t a metric. It’s a choice.
And if you’ve spent all your time making sure they never have to make a choice, don’t be surprised when they eventually choose someone else.
We need to stop worshiping the ‘Buy Again’ button and start worrying about what happens when the customer finally finds the ‘Delete Account’ button. Because if the only thing keeping them there was the fact that they didn’t want to type their name again, we’ve already lost them. We’re just waiting for the world to notice.
