The Disneyland Trap: why a flawless brand experience might be costing you loyal customers

We’ve all been sold the same dream. Click once. Buy instantly. No hassle, no hiccups, no friction. Brands are pouring millions into polishing every pixel and smoothing every bump in the journey, creating what I call the Disneyland experience. A seamless, frictionless fairy tale where nothing ever goes wrong, and the customer glides from awareness to checkout without breaking a sweat.

Here’s the problem: it’s not working.

I spent the better part of last week buried in our own client data, and the pattern was impossible to ignore. The brands most obsessed with zero friction had the highest churn rates. Customers arrived, bought, and disappeared, like they’d passed through a drive-through and forgotten what they’d ordered before they reached the off-ramp. Meanwhile, the brands that made people work a little? Those held onto their customers for years.

This isn’t gut feel dressed up as strategy. Behavioural economists call it the IKEA Effect, and it’s one of the most reliably reproduced findings in consumer psychology. When people build their own furniture, they value it more. Not despite the effort, but because of it. Participants who assembled their own flat-packs rated their amateurish creations on par with professionally made pieces. Strip away the effort, and you strip away the emotional attachment.

And the research goes further. When a purchase feels routine, when it’s too easy, people move through it without really thinking. It’s forgettable by design. Moderate friction, on the other hand, nudges people into reflective engagement. They slow down. They consider. They invest, emotionally, not just financially. That investment is what turns a once-off buyer into someone who comes back, tells their friends, and quietly becomes one of your most valuable assets.

Look at Nike’s SNKRS app. They turned buying sneakers into a proper game, customers solve clues, hunt locations, and crack word puzzles just for the chance to purchase a pair. Some sneakerheads spend hours on a single drop, and they are not complaining. They’re obsessed. Nike’s digital business grew 38%, driven largely by that app. Customers don’t say they bought shoes. They say they won them. That’s not a transaction. That’s a story they’ll tell.

Now imagine a South African streetwear brand running something similar, a WhatsApp drop where a clue goes out at 6 am, an urban-based scavenger hunt where only the first ten through the door get access to a limited colourway. The mechanic is the same. The loyalty would be too. Earned exclusivity travels. It’s not a Nike thing; it’s a human thing.

Then there’s Glossier, which built a beauty empire not by selling products but by inviting customers to help design them. Their rep programme turned everyday buyers into brand advocates, people with a voice, a platform, and genuine skin in the game. The result was 600% sales growth in a single year. Not from a campaign. From making people feel like they belonged to something they’d helped build.

Map your customer journey, not to eliminate every difficult moment, but to identify the ones worth keeping. The quiz before the consultation. The waitlist for the new service line. The community session before onboarding begins. The application process that filters for the right fit rather than just the fastest click.

These moments feel like friction. They are friction. But they’re also the moments where people decide whether they’re actually in or just passing through. The brands that understand this don’t optimise those moments away; they design them with care, so the effort feels purposeful rather than punishing.

There’s a meaningful difference between friction that frustrates and friction that engages. One is a broken door handle. The other is a puzzle you chose to solve. Your job is to know which one you’re building and to have an honest answer for why it’s there.

The Disneyland experience is impressive. But nobody tattoos a theme park logo on their arm. They tattoo the brands that made them work for it, that let them belong, that felt in some small but irreplaceable way, like theirs.

Build something worth earning. Then trust your customers enough to let them earn it.