How Utility And AI Are Redefining Customer Devotion

Decades ago, I found myself in a small haberdashery in Milan, captivated by a pair of calfskin gloves. The leather was supple, the stitching meticulous, and they possessed an altogether unnecessary thumb gusset. I remember the precise shade of tobacco brown. I bought them not because I loved the brand, which I have long forgotten, but because I loved the object itself, an affinity utterly distinct from corporate loyalty.

This small, personal obsession underscores the seismic shift facing marketers now: the belief that brand loyalty is a deep, abiding emotional affair—a treasured affinity built over years—has proven largely incorrect. The heart has left the checkout line.

A new study, commissioned by Razorfish and executed by GWI, suggests that while two-thirds of marketers maintain this romantic notion of enduring customer devotion, actual consumer behavior reveals a far more transactional reality.

Loyalty, it turns out, is a matter of pure, unromantic utility. It hinges on convenience, faultless product performance, and the simple fact that the item meets a tangible, real-world requirement. For most categories we frequent—from daily groceries to the surprisingly crucial quick service restaurants and airlines—fewer than a quarter of consumers cite "brand love" as the motive for repeat purchases.

The enduring passion is often reserved for a singular item, a highly specialized product that provides irreplaceable satisfaction. If their favorite product were to vanish—that highly specific shade of lipstick or the single-source coffee bean—more than half of all consumers would simply relocate their affections to a competitor within the week.

Brand identity is nice, perhaps, but functional consistency is paramount.

Now, as we approach the fiscal inflection point of the year—with Black Friday just sixteen days away, despite the deluge of holiday emails that began weeks prior—marketers are scrambling to adapt these findings using the industry’s current obsession: artificial intelligence.

AI, being the ultimate engine of efficiency, is ideally suited to delivering hyper-personalized convenience, the very metric driving modern loyalty. Conversations with industry leaders, such as Klaviyo CMO Jamie Domenici, highlight new opportunities for targeted efficiency, moving beyond the broad-stroke sentimentality that once defined holiday campaigns.

This push toward efficiency and novelty has led some major players down rather confusing paths.

Coca-Cola, having already generated considerable controversy with its AI-created holiday ads last year, decided to embrace the digital future again for its 2025 U.S. campaign. Yes, the entire production, the festive centerpiece of the season, is fully AI-generated. The resulting two ads feature a surreal, somewhat unsettling convergence of natural and unnatural imagery: various animals enthusiastically welcoming a caravan of Coca-Cola trucks. In one version, the animals behave entirely as expected.

In the other, however, the animals act much like tourists in tailored coats, riding trains, enjoying a casual river cruise, and partaking in sightseeing. The full embrace of video AI is still a controversial point of contention, certainly.

The backlash, meticulously detailed by Forbes senior contributor Dani Di Placido, revolves less around the technology itself and more around the ethics of resource displacement—using fewer human creatives for the campaign—and the unsettling quality of the final product.

Online observers noted the sometimes "creepy and unrealistic depictions," particularly of Santa Claus, who remains the only fully visible human figure. And while the craft of this year’s video has improved demonstrably, Business Insider rolled through its technical inconsistencies. Specifically, the trucks featured in the campaign suffer from a peculiar digital malady: their wheel configurations seem to shift, often mid-scene, a fleeting, confusing detail that disrupts the illusion.

AI can deliver convenience, perhaps, but it struggles with the mundane reality of four constant wheels. That a brand would risk such strange imagery for the sake of embracing a nascent technology. It begs the question of whether efficiency, devoid of human intuition, can ever truly replicate the subtle, persuasive charm that transforms a product into a treasured necessity.