Ken Hughes
Brands are investing heavily in digital experience and AI-driven personalisation, yet emotional loyalty is declining. Modern consumers – especially Gen Z and Gen Alpha – judge brands not by service quality but by authenticity, community, and belonging. Most leadership teams can describe their customer experience; almost none can explain why their customers stay.
As consumer expectations shift from transactional satisfaction to emotional belonging, Ken Hughes – CEO of Glacier Consulting and author of Taylormaking – gives organisations a behavioural framework for understanding what modern customers actually respond to and how to build brand connection that generates genuine loyalty.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Ken Hughes
- His Blue Dot Consumer framework gives leadership teams a named model for the modern consumer – one who places themselves at the centre of every interaction and expects brands to be instant, personal, and emotionally authentic. It replaces vague customer-centricity language with a concrete diagnostic tool.
- Taylormaking, his 2025 book, uses Taylor Swift’s 12 studio albums as a structured analytical framework for brand intimacy – demonstrating how emotional loyalty, tribal belonging, and values-led branding operate in practice and what that requires from commercial strategy.
- A career spanning strategy consulting at Accenture, consumer insight at Nielsen, and 25 years as CEO of Glacier Consulting gives him a rare combination: analytical training in how consumers behave and sustained practical experience of what actually shifts in boardrooms.
- Named by CX Network among the Top 50 CX Leaders to Follow in 2025 and the Top 50 AI Leaders in CX to Follow in 2026, he brings an externally validated, current perspective on where consumer expectations are heading – not where they have been.
- His interdisciplinary base – consumer psychology, behavioural economics, digital anthropology, and cyberpsychology – lets him explain brand decisions as outcomes of human behaviour, not just marketing choices. That distinction is particularly valuable in conversations with senior leaders who have grown sceptical of CX as a function.
Biography highlights
- CEO and founder of Glacier Consulting, a consumer insight agency whose clients include Coca-Cola, IKEA, AXA, Unilever, Walmart, Google, Microsoft, and PayPal
- Former Strategy Consultant at Accenture and Manager of Consumer Insight at Nielsen
- Part-time lecturer in Consumer Behaviour at University College Cork
- Author of Taylormaking: A New Era of Modern Branding and Customer Connection (2025), a CX strategy book structured around Taylor Swift’s 12 studio albums
- TEDx speaker at TEDxUniversityofNicosia; talk has received more than 100,000 online views
- Named by CX Network among the Top 50 Customer Experience Leaders to Follow in 2025 and Top 50 AI Leaders in CX to Follow in 2026
Biography
Customer loyalty has become harder to earn as the expectations of consumers – particularly Gen Z and Gen Alpha – have shifted from satisfaction to emotional belonging. Ken Hughes built Glacier Consulting around one persistent question: why do people buy, and what does that mean for how brands should behave? After earlier careers as a strategy consultant at Accenture and a consumer insight manager at Nielsen, he has spent more than two decades embedding behavioural science into commercial practice.
His named concept, the Blue Dot Consumer, gives organisations a specific model for the modern customer – one who treats themselves as the centre of every interaction, expecting brands to be instant, personal, and emotionally intelligent. That framework, rooted in consumer psychology, digital anthropology, and behavioural economics, underpins both his consultancy work and his keynote practice across five continents.
His 2025 book, Taylormaking, extends that argument into a structured analysis of brand intimacy, using Taylor Swift’s 12 studio albums as a framework for understanding emotional loyalty, tribal community, and values-led leadership. It is a useful index of how Hughes works: making the mechanisms of consumer psychology legible and commercially actionable for leadership audiences well beyond the CX function.
A part-time lecturer in Consumer Behaviour at University College Cork and named by CX Network among the Top 50 CX Leaders to Follow in both 2025 and 2026, Hughes speaks more than 80 times annually. His client roster – spanning Coca-Cola, Unilever, Walmart, Google, Microsoft, and PayPal – reflects both the breadth of sectors in which his behavioural arguments apply and the seniority of the audiences he typically addresses.
Key speaking topics
- Consumer psychology and shopper behaviour
- Customer experience strategy
- Brand connection and emotional loyalty
- Generational consumer shifts – Gen Z and Gen Alpha
- AI and the future of customer experience
- Creativity and innovation in commercial culture
Ideal for
- CMOs and marketing leaders focused on building brand loyalty in a competitive, AI-influenced landscape
- Customer experience leaders navigating the shift from transactional to emotionally driven consumer relationships
- Senior commercial and retail leaders seeking behavioural insight into how younger consumer cohorts make brand decisions
- Transformation and innovation leads rethinking how brands earn and sustain connection with modern audiences
Audience outcomes
- A named model – the Blue Dot Consumer – for diagnosing how modern consumers make brand decisions and what they expect from every brand interaction
- Practical understanding of how emotional loyalty differs from satisfaction, and what organisations must do differently to build it
- Insight into how Gen Z and Gen Alpha are reshaping brand expectations and what that requires from commercial and marketing strategy
- Clarity on AI’s role in the future of customer experience – where automation strengthens brand connection and where it risks eroding it
- A framework, drawn from Taylormaking, for building tribal brand belonging through authenticity, community, and values-led leadership
Talks
Examines how modern consumers place themselves at the centre of every brand interaction, expecting experiences that are instant, personal, and emotionally intelligent.
Key takeaways:
- Insight into the shift from transactional relationships to meaning-driven customer connection
- Understanding how AI, robotics, and immersive platforms are shaping consumer expectations
- Clarity on how Gen Z and Gen Alpha are redefining brand relevance and experience standards
Demonstrates how emotional loyalty, tribal belonging, and values-led branding operate in practice, using the principles behind one of the most successful brand communities of the modern era.
Key takeaways:
- Understanding how emotional loyalty is built through consistent investment in customer and employee experience
- Practical insight into personalisation, co-creation, and community-building as commercial strategies
- A framework for moving from transactional engagement to deeper brand belonging
A behavioural perspective on how artificial intelligence, data, and automation are reshaping consumer expectations and redefining how brands build relevance.
Key takeaways:
- Insight into how AI is influencing how customers think, choose, and relate to brands
- Understanding the convergence of technology innovation and rising generational expectations
- Clarity on how data and automation are rewriting the customer experience playbook
Explores the psychological and cultural conditions required for sustained innovation, challenging teams to embrace risk, vulnerability, and creative tension as commercial assets.
Key takeaways:
- Understanding why teams struggle to sustain innovation and how organisational culture can inhibit bold thinking
- Insight into how playfulness and vulnerability support creative performance in commercial settings
- Practical tools to shift mindsets and re-energise innovation momentum
A provocative examination of the tension between the pursuit of continuous growth and the realities of environmental and social sustainability.
Key takeaways:
- Insight into the behavioural and cultural drivers behind the pursuit of growth as an end in itself
- A reframing of “flat growth” and sufficiency as credible and strategic leadership positions
- Perspective on how sustainability considerations are reshaping future business values and decision-making
Videos
Testimonials
Books
Fees
| EUR | GBP | USD | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home Country | Please enquire | Please enquire | Please enquire |
| Asia Pacific | Please enquire | Please enquire | Please enquire |
| Europe | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| Middle East & Africa | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| South America | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| United Kingdom | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| US East Coast | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| US West Coast | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| Virtual | Under €12000 | Under £10,000 | Under $15000 |