Where Consumer Loyalty Is Built — One Brand Decision at a Time
In consumer and retail, the product gets you in the door. The brand is what makes someone choose you again, recommend you to a friend, or pay more without thinking twice. The companies that succeed aren’t the ones with the lowest price or the loudest campaign. They’re the ones whose brand has earned a specific, durable meaning in the customer’s mind — one that holds up when the economy tightens, the competition multiplies, and AI starts mediating how people discover what to buy.
WANT has been building consumer and retail brands for over 25 years — for lifestyle companies, automotive retailers, hospitality groups, and consumer-facing brands navigating reinvention. We understand the specific challenge of building a brand that performs at scale, in person, and increasingly, in conversation with an AI assistant a customer never sees.
What's Changing in Consumer Retail
01
Loyalty is eroding — even among reliable customers.
Three in four consumers are now trading down to cheaper brands, and loyalty among older shoppers is fading too. Price and convenience alone no longer keep people coming back. The brands retaining customers give people a reason that has nothing to do with price. When WANT rebranded ClubCorp to Invited, the work redefined what membership meant to a generation that doesn’t join clubs the way their parents did.
02
AI is becoming the new storefront.
58% of shoppers now use generative AI instead of traditional search to find products — and only 1% of what AI cites comes from a brand’s own website. The story is increasingly told by everyone except the brand. Winning that means having an identity clear enough to survive being filtered through someone else’s words.
03
Experience is beating assortment.
Spending on experiences is growing faster than spending on goods, and retail space is being redesigned around it. The brand can’t just live on packaging anymore — it has to show up as a feeling. We saw this building Cosmic Wings, the Applebee’s and Cheetos ghost kitchen, where the brand had to create craveability with no physical storefront at all.
Featured Work.
Invited
Consumer & Retail — Brand Strategy, Brand Naming, Brand Identity
ClubCorp had spent decades building the largest network of private clubs in the country — golf, country clubs, business clubs — but the brand hadn’t kept pace with a changing relationship between people and membership. The name itself, ClubCorp, sounded corporate and impersonal for an experience increasingly built on belonging. The brand needed a shift to a broader audience and more visible story.
WANT developed Invited — a name and brand platform that reframed membership as something personal rather than transactional. The new identity gave the company a brand worthy of the experience it had now delivered, and a story flexible enough to anchor everything from a neighborhood country club to The Invited Classic, the company’s marquee golf tournament.
