TLF Gems Newsletter August 2025

Your monthly CX and insight newsletter from TLF Research

One of the oldest mistakes you can make with advertising is to position your brand on something the customer wants that you simply cannot deliver on.

Mark Ritson

One of my favourite business books of all time is Phil Rosenzweig's "The Halo Effect". In it he argues that most popular business books take an overly reductive approach, reducing complex webs of causation to a neat, single-factor, explanation.

The real world is always more complex than this, and it's our job as researchers to try to understand it. Not only that, it's our job to communicate our understanding to other people in a way that will drive improvement. The answer, it seems to me, is finding the right balance of theory, knowing our data, and understanding the context of the business it needs to be applied to.

That combination of theory, data, and context is where useful recommendations are born.

Thanks for reading,

Stephen

Here are 7 things we think are worth your time this month

How Differentiation Works

Summary of an interesting study looking at the way differentiation interacts with other brand attributes. Is differentiation the key, or a red herring? This won't settle the argument, but it might help move it towards a more fruitful, nuanced, place. "Differentiation isn’t meaningless. It has real business impacts and can drive penetration, market share, and other things."

Watch: How Differentiation Works

Customer Service Sludge

Good article about "sludge" (i.e. deliberately poor customer service) as a tactic organisations use to safeguard profits or discourage customer behaviours they don't like. Needless to say, this is a terrible idea. You might want to ask if it's creeping into your own customer experience? "Ostensibly the goal of customer service is to serve customers. Often enough, its true purpose is to defeat them."

Read: Customer Service Sludge

Designing for Vulnerability

Really good example of how small design decisions which understand where customers are can be tremendously powerful. Monzo Bank's app notices if you're on a call, and warns you that it's not them in case you're falling victim to a phone scammer. "It’s a reminder that great product teams don’t chase clever features. They focus on understanding real user problems and solving them in the smallest, most meaningful way."

Read: Designing for Vulnerability

Data Storytelling

The Processing Foundation has announced its 2025 Data Storytelling Fellows. Some really beautiful and inspiring work here. "This year, we're exploring Data Storytelling by pushing the boundaries of creative coding to uncover hidden narratives through sound, theater, dance, and documentary work."

Read: Data Storytelling

How To Surf The Web

Some of you are probably too young to remember this, but there was a time when going online meant surfing rather than scrolling. This piece makes a passionate case that there is still joy and fascination to be found this way, if you can remember how! "This internet, of the late 90s to early 2000s, offered a completely different sensory and emotional experience than today’s...Surfing through this structure was characterized [by] feelings of wonder and abundance."

Read: How To Surf The Web

AI Is Not Doing Its Job

Excellent puncturing of much of the AI hype-train from Gartner's head of AI research. Hard to disagree that there's a lot of tail-wagging-the-dog about the current rush to apply GenAI to everything, rather than starting with problems that employees actually have. "This is a software engineering problem. You need people who understand you decompose systems, when they can communicate, the degree to which they communicate, the different autonomy levels that you give within an agent."

Read: AI Is Not Doing Its Job

What I'm Reading: Opening Skinner's Box

In the middle of this one, and I'd give it a cautious recommendation. If you're interested in psychology you'll know about many of the classic (and often controversial) experiments covered, but the author does a great job of explaining the background and modern implications of each. Her personal reflections sometimes become a bit much, but the explanations are really good. "My hope is that some of these experiments will be more fully taken in by readers now that they have been translated into narrative form."

What I'm Reading: Opening Skinner's Box

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