Memorable Experience is the New Growth Engine
Memorable experience is the part of the product that survives commoditisation, and it is what gives the customer a reason to advocate, says Darius LaBelle, Managing Director, Middle East at November Five.
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Digital transformation has long focused on making experiences faster, smoother, and more frictionless.
Businesses invested heavily in new platforms, AI systems, and customer experience strategies with the belief that convenience alone would drive loyalty. But as digital experiences across industries begin to look increasingly similar, many brands are discovering that usability is no longer enough to stand out.
According to Darius LaBelle, the bigger challenge is that most companies design products to complete tasks efficiently, but not necessarily to leave a lasting impression. Customers already expect apps and platforms to work seamlessly.
What increasingly shapes loyalty is whether the experience creates a feeling people remember after the interaction ends.
This thinking sits at the centre of November Five’s Memory Experience (MX) framework, which focuses on designing ‘signature moments’ inside digital journeys rather than optimising every interaction purely for speed.
“Efficiency and convenience are now table stakes. Every serious competitor is fast and frictionless. AI is going to compress that further, and quickly… The deeper risk is one that most product teams aren’t discussing,” says Darius LaBelle, Managing Director, Middle East at November Five.
In this interview, LaBelle discusses why many digital transformations fail once they reach operational reality, how AI is accelerating both innovation and fragmentation, and why memorable experience is becoming the real competitive advantage.
Excerpts from the interview;
Many digital transformation efforts look compelling in boardrooms but fail in the real world. Where exactly do they break, and what are companies consistently getting wrong?
Most of them break at the same place: where the work meets the operating model. The strategy is sound, the technology is buyable, and the user research is good. What fails is the joint. A bank ships an onboarding journey, and the identity flow depends on three vendors with no shared recovery path.
A retailer launches a loyalty app sitting next to a CRM never designed for personalisation and a contact centre that hasn’t been trained on it. The product looks coherent in the demo and fragmented in the wild.
The underlying problem is that digital products get treated as software when they are operating model decisions. The code is the expression of an operating model, a functioning one if things go well, a fantasy one if nobody designed the operational reality before the build started.
Who owns the outcome, who makes the trade-offs, how exceptions get handled, and how the work flows across functions. Those questions decide whether the product works. The code expresses those decisions; it doesn’t substitute them.
Enterprises also consistently confuse governance with decision-making. Hard trade-offs in functionality and experience get escalated, diluted, or turned into consensus theatre. By the time the product is live, no one owns the customer consequence. AI compounds this.
Layered onto a fragmented operating model, it surfaces the fragmentation faster.
You’ve spent over two decades across North America, EMEA, and now the Middle East. What feels fundamentally different about how growth is being driven in the region, and what’s accelerating that shift?
The clearest difference is the speed at which strategic intent converts into execution. Capital is patient at scale, decisions move faster at the top, and there is far less legacy debt to renegotiate.
PwC’s 29th CEO Survey put it bluntly: 88% of Middle East CEOs are confident in domestic growth, rising to 93% across the GCC, against 55% globally. The region recorded 12% average revenue growth in the last fiscal year, against 8% globally.
In Europe and North America, large transformations take years while arguing about who owns the budget. In the GCC, the budget is set, the mandate is clear, and the question is: Who can deliver within the timeframe?
The second difference is the customer. The MENA digital consumer leapfrogged a generation of intermediate technology.
People here moved from physical to mobile-first with very little in between, and we continue to be at the forefront of early adoption, which means consumers’ expectations were set by the best apps in the world from day one. We are less tolerant of mediocre digital experiences than almost any market I have worked in.
What’s accelerating right now is the convergence of three forces. The first is AI deployment at speed. The same PwC survey shows that 39% of Middle East CEOs and 43% of GCC CEOs already report extensive AI use in sales, marketing, and service, compared with 22% globally.
In addition, more than a third of regional leaders are integrating AI directly into their offerings, compared with fewer than one in five globally. The second is the maturing regulatory frameworks around data protection and AI ethics that make enterprise deployment defensible.
The third is a new generation of senior leaders who are operators rather than sponsors. There is a bias to action: decisions that used to take a quarter now take a short meeting.
The Memory Experience (MX) framework leans on the peak-end rule, but most digital journeys are continuous. How do you engineer ‘signature moments’ in systems where reliability matters more than delight?
MX applies inside any meaningful interaction, even when the broader relationship is continuous. A banking app is used continuously, but a payment transfer has an end. A disrupted flight has a recovery moment that lives in memory long after the trip. We design at the level of those micro-journeys. The platform is the carrier.
In high-stakes systems, reliability is the precondition for memory. If the product fails technically, you’ve created a memorable moment of the wrong kind.
Once reliability is solved, the question becomes which moments deserve to be remembered, and what should happen at those moments to leave the customer feeling competent, supported, or trusted.
Most enterprises optimise the average as part of the overall flow. We design the peaks deliberately and let the average take care of itself.
Having worked on platforms for brands like Coca-Cola and Spotify. Can you point to a specific product decision where designing for memory — not usability — changed a measurable business outcome?
One example would be our work with BASE, Belgium’s challenger telco and a brand competing in one of Europe’s most commodified mobile markets. When price is the only battleground, the experience is usually the first casualty, and BASE wanted to break that pattern.
The specific decision came when we were redesigning the self-service flows inside the MyBASE app. The entire industry was racing toward frictionless: fewer steps, faster completion, and getting out of the way. We went the other direction. We introduced a 20-second guided flow for budget management, asking customers to slow down, set spending limits, and understand their usage.
Every stakeholder instinct said this was wrong. Customers described it as the moment BASE understood them. That distinction is the whole argument. We were designing for a feeling of security at a moment when most people feel anxious about their phone bill. The feature became the peak of the relationship that was built on.
When BASE needed to explain invoices to reduce billing complaints, we ran a head-to-head: an AI-orchestrated video explanation against a slower, text-led guided flow. The AI video was more impressive and newer.
The text flow won because customers valued clarity and the sense of being in control over novelty. Meaningful friction outperformed the more technically advanced option.
The outcome across both decisions: 35% more customers activated budget controls in the first month, a 4.3 CSAT score in a category that typically scores near the bottom, and Belgium’s highest-rated telco app.
BASE’s national advertising campaign was eventually built around the product experience. Fast Company gave it Best UX 2024. The usable answer would have been faster flows and fewer steps. The memorable answer was the moment a customer felt their telco was actually on their side.
We see the same principle in our regional work on NOFOMO, the event platform we built for MDLBEAST in Saudi Arabia. The brief was ticketing. A usability-led answer would have optimised for purchase speed and entry efficiency (we delivered both, 50% faster gate entry and 30% less staff support on the ground).
But the product decision that drove the commercial outcome was different. We designed around the act of going together, not just the act of buying. Ticket sharing became a social ritual built into the product, not a back-end transfer function.
This resulted in 200,000 users in six months with zero marketing spend, 61% conversion rate, and 88.5% of users recommending the platform. The experience of bringing your group, coordinating attendance, arriving as a collective was as deliberately designed as the checkout flow.
Finally, if memorable experience is becoming the real driver of growth, where does that leave brands still focused mainly on efficiency and convenience, and what risks are they overlooking?
Efficiency and convenience are now table stakes. Every serious competitor is fast and frictionless. AI is going to compress that further, and quickly. Whatever head-start efficiency built is going to keep getting cheaper to copy.
The deeper risk is one that most product teams aren’t discussing. Frictionless is not a brand value. Somewhere between the brand strategy and the product backlog, the promise gets lost. What gets built instead is a clean interface optimised for task completion and in-app conversion metrics, indistinguishable from every competitor who made the same trade-off.
That’s the race already underway in retail banking, in telco, and in airlines. Loyalty in those categories is collapsing not just because competitors are cheaper, but because the experience gives customers no emotional signal worth holding onto.
Nothing in the product reflects what the brand said it stood for. Habit fills the gap until a cheaper option appears, and habit breaks instantly.
Emirates is the proof. They built memorability into the product from day one, consistently, at every price point across their product. The result is a brand that commands a genuine premium and preference on routes where several other carriers offer a functionally identical service.
Emirates consistently outperforms on customer satisfaction, awards, and ranking, and generates the kind of organic advocacy no media budget replicates.
Memorable experience is the part of the product that survives commoditisation, and it is what gives the customer a reason to advocate.
