By Natalie Johnson
Ask an executive team where the next round of growth will come from, and the answers tend to be familiar: acquisitions, new markets, new products, price increases. Greg Tucker, CEO of Tucker & Company, has built his work around an item that rarely makes that list: removing the friction customers run into when they deal with a brand. He calls the approach Frictionless Brand Experience, which is also the title of his 2026 book.
In Tucker’s view, the omission has little to do with whether leaders care about customers. Most do. The problem is that friction rarely shows up with a number attached, and in a room full of competing priorities, the idea without a number usually loses.
Tucker sorts that friction into six types: brand, digital, product, operational, organizational, and cultural. Some are visible to customers, while others start inside the company, but all of them get in the customer’s way.
The Standard He Brought From Strategy Consulting
Tucker’s route into this work explains a great deal about how he approaches it. After earning his MBA at Stanford Graduate School of Business, he spent more than fifteen years in strategy consulting, working with C-suite leaders to identify strategic and operational improvements, build the business case for change, and lead the programs that delivered it. The standard in that work was demanding: even a newly hired associate could be asked to defend a recommendation in front of a CEO, and a recommendation that could not be tied to financial impact did not hold up.
He carried that habit into customer experience roughly twenty years ago, when he became CMO and Transformation Officer at the online auto auction company Copart after helping lead customer experience transformation work at AAA. Most of his peers in the field had come up through customer service, market research, voice-of-the-customer programs, or CRM technology. “Because I joined from management consulting, I brought a C-suite perspective, strategy-linkage experience and financial analysis expertise” he writes.
At Copart, he documented the opportunity with the same financial rigor he had been trained to apply to any strategic recommendation. The work earned the 2012 Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) Innovation Award for what was titled the “$100 Million Customer Journey.” Tucker found a discipline that, at the time, had few models for connecting experience improvements to business results and was often treated by senior leadership as a soft competency rather than a financial lever. Today he serves on the CXPA Board of Directors, and the association asked him to advise its “Proven Business Impact” submission and award process.
Why Sound Recommendations Lose the Budget Fight
Tucker does not feel that customer experience professionals are giving bad advice. Many of the recommendations he sees are operationally sound. What they often lack is a clear estimate of what the fix is worth, and that gap becomes decisive when they compete for the same resources as everything else on the executive agenda.
“Without an ROI, there would be an argument regarding what’s the MOST important,” he has written, “and CX improvements typically don’t win that argument with the political power of established leaders in the room.”
His approach is designed to close that gap. It starts from the outside in, documenting what customers actually experience rather than what the organization believes they experience, then identifies where friction appears, estimates its effect on acquiring, expanding, and keeping customers, and ranks the possible fixes by the size of the opportunity. Across more than fifty research projects, Tucker, through his research, benchmarked what friction does to customer behavior. Customers who encountered friction switched brands at two to five times the rate of those who did not, whether they described the effort involved as low or very high.
What Four Basics of the Brand Promise Revealed
One of the clearest illustrations comes from work with a quick-service restaurant chain. Customer interviews and quantitative research showed that diners wanted four things: a clean restaurant, friendly staff, good food, and an accurate order. Measured one at a time, performance looked respectable. About 80 percent of surveyed customers said the restaurant was clean, 75 percent said staff were friendly, and 80 percent said the food was tasty and a good value. Order accuracy lagged at 60 percent.
The more revealing figure came from looking at all four together. Only 30 percent of customers said every element was present on their last visit, and another 30 percent said none of them were. The analysis estimated that improving delivery on those four elements could raise customer visits by 30 percent and customer lifecycle value by 60 percent.
The lesson Tucker draws is about focus. A company can chase a long list of small improvements and still miss the few things that determine whether customers come back. Across his work, he has found that only 30 to 40 percent of customers typically report a consistent, on-brand experience. In his view, the problem is usually not that the brand was designed poorly. When companies do deliver on the Brand Promise they designed, the results tend to be strong. The breakdown happens in Brand Experience execution, and it stays invisible until someone measures it.
What Friction Costs at Scale
Tucker points to an estimate from Qualtrics XM Institute, which found that bad customer experiences would put $3 trillion in sales at risk globally in 2026, based on survey responses from 20,000 consumers across fourteen countries.
His own evidence is narrower and more direct. In the thirteen years after the Copart award, he worked with more than fifty global brands to identify where customers were running into friction and what removing it was worth. When he reviewed that body of work in early 2025, the opportunities his teams had identified totaled more than $25 billion in revenue. That work became the basis for Frictionless Brand Experience and the six sources of friction that drive brand switching and value leakage. The book of the same name adds perspectives from more than sixty-five practitioners he interviewed.
Why He Identifies It As a Brand Problem
For Tucker, friction is a brand issue before it is a service issue. It is often spotted first by the people closest to customers, sales, support, or experience roles, but whether anything changes usually depends on the executives who decide what the brand stands for and where the money goes.
He draws a clear line between two terms that are often used interchangeably. A brand promise is what a company says it will deliver, defined from the inside out. The brand experience is what customers actually get, judged from the outside in. “Your brand is your brand experience,” he writes, “not logos, tag lines, imagery, promotions, or social media.”
That distinction changes the job of the marketing leader. A promise can be crafted in a strategy session. The experience happens at the counter, on the phone, at renewal, or when a customer opens a delivery bag at home and finds an item missing. Tucker’s argument is that the executive responsible for the brand needs a reliable way to see how often the experience matches the promise, and what it costs when it does not.
The question he puts to brand leaders is simple to ask and hard to answer: what percent of revenue leaks out of the brand because of friction customers experience, and how much revenue does that translate to? Many, by his account, are not sure. His work is built to replace that uncertainty with a number and a clear view of where revenue is leaking and what to fix first. One place he starts is a Brand Experience Alignment assessment, a simple exercise designed to quickly show which parts of the organization are not aligned with the brand promise.
More on the approach is available in Frictionless Brand Experience on Amazon.
