ArticleIssue #141 | Leverage Moments
I hope this finds you well – and hopefully with some time to enjoy the fall air, football (if that’s your thing) and some unhurried moments with friends/family. It’s hard to believe that BFCM is almost on the regular forecast – and Christmas is on the extended one. But, as 2025 hits the home stretch, I’ve found myself spending some time thinking a lot about impact.
Marketing is an industry obsessed with optimization – more precise targeting, smarter audiences, higher conversion rates. Every click, every impression, every conversion measured to the third decimal place. But for all that precision, it’s often the unmeasurable things that move people most. The small, human moments. The tiny details that seem illogical to design, yet somehow produce disproportionately large impacts.
A few years ago, a few friends and I had dinner at Eleven Madison Park in New York City. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s one of those “once-in-a-lifetime” dining experiences. I’m fairly confident they’ve won just about every accolade out there. It has all three Michelin stars, it’s ranked among the world’s top-50 restaurants, the Executive Chef (Daniel Humm) has a James Beard award. You name it, they’ve probably won it. And, as you’d expect at a place like that, the food was extraordinary. Unreal. Positively out-of-this-world delicious. Of course, you’re probably wondering how in the world a bougie dinner in 2023 connects to marketing today.
The answer is what I’ve termed “leverage moments”
You can categorize every aspect of an experience – dining, drinks, professional engagement, purchase, customer journey, whatever – somewhere in the below 2×2 matrix:
When you dine at a fancy restaurant, you expect the food, the atmosphere and the service to be the upper-right-hand quadrant of the matrix – after all, that’s why you’re dining there. Those are core aspects that comprise the “Standard” established for that restaurant, based on the story you’ve been told (either by the restaurant directly, by the reviews you’ve heard, by the press coverage they’ve received, the price point of the menu, etc.). If those “core” aspects of the experience are terrible, and that experience is relatively common, the restaurant won’t be in business too long (especially in a hyper-competitive market like NYC).
You can summarize the entire top-half of the experience as “core operational competence.” And, candidly, it’s not that interesting. Sure, you can do little things to one-up your competition – use fancier ingredients, flashier presentations, more ornate touches, whatever – but the effect of that is akin to turning up the volume at a Metallica concert. At some point, it’s just loud to the vast majority of the audience. They don’t perceive the differences. The incremental effort required to move another degree on the X-axis of the chart above simply does not produce a commensurate return.
That’s the paradox of the top-half of the matrix: excellence in the “expected” areas rarely creates leverage. It’s just expected.
What’s far more interesting is the bottom-half of the matrix. These are the aspects of the experience that are unexpected – things that aren’t core to the offering or that are traditionally assumed to be “meh” or worse. As someone who has dined at my fair share of fancy restaurants, one of those things is the coffee.
I am – by no means – a coffee snob. I like good coffee. I do not know, nor can I taste, the finer differences in taste between an Ethiopian high-altitude Arabica bean and a more subdued Guatemalan bean. I just like good coffee, with nothing in it (including, and especially) judgement. Unfortunately for me (and coffee drinkers like me), at fancy restaurants we are basically second-class citizens. Unlike the tea drinkers (who get an entire experience with carts of loose-leaf teas rolled out and all kinds of fancy brew techniques, dessert pairings, the works), coffee drinkers get a half-assed menu with 3-4 “standard” options: Americano, Cappuccino, Flat White, maybe a Cortado. Do you need anything more? Nah. But it doesn’t exactly feel good to be treated like I’m a heathen just because I need my caffeine fix.
In the matrix above, this falls into the “yellow” box – it is certainly not something that is core to a fine dining experience (that would be the food, the service, the ambiance, etc.). I’ve gotten used to this aspect of my experience at fancy restaurants being mediocre-at-best. I have low expectations and they’re met half the time.
And this is where Eleven Madison Park did something remarkable. They’ve gone above and beyond to create a truly remarkable experience for coffee drinkers – to the point where they did something I had never before experienced at a restaurant. When I asked for a coffee, they sent over a “coffee sommelier” who came to the table and told me all about the beans, their origin, how they’re roasted, how each bean/blend is brewed and (most importantly) which ones are most likely to go with whatever dessert I ordered (honestly, the coffee was more memorable than the dessert).
That experience was so surprising and remarkable that I still talk about it to this day – years later. What’s even more remarkable than the coffee was the incremental return for the restaurant. I have no idea the exact cost of hiring a coffee expert, buying some fancy-looking coffee making machinery and importing a bunch of beans, I am quite certain it’s less than the cost of expanding the wine cellar or adding gold-infused caviar to a portion of the menu. Maybe it cost them $20,000 or $30,000 to upgrade from whatever it is they were doing to the fancy setup. Sure, that’s real money – but it’s hardly a fortune (especially in the world of fine dining, where a single piece of kitchen equipment can be $100,000+) – and the return on that incremental investment is positively massive.
That’s a leverage moment.
These same moments exist everywhere – from senior living to travel/tourism, eCommerce to home services. They’re defined by four core characteristics:
1. Asymmetric Impact
Leverage moments create disproportionate emotional return relative to the investment required.
They’re the marketing equivalent of pulling a small lever that moves a massive boulder. At Eleven Madison Park, a few thousand dollars in coffee program enhancements generated millions of dollars’ worth of conversation equity and brand memory. The same principle applies in other industries: a $20 gesture can deliver $20,000 in perceived goodwill when deployed at the right moment.
2. Expectation Inversion
One of the fundamental truths about people is that we’re prediction machines. We have evolved to move through the world more efficiently by assuming “what usually happens here.” As Daniel Kahneman observed, our brains are adapted for cognitive ease; we conserve energy by trusting the familiar and completing unfinished patterns. That’s why when an experience violates our mental model – when something unexpectedly good happens in a moment we’d written off – the result is something both shocking and memorable.
Leverage moments exploit that evolutionary eccentricity. They occur when you deliberately invert expectations in an emotionally relevant moment.
You can see this pattern everywhere:
- In fine dining, you expect extraordinary food. You don’t expect extraordinary coffee.
- In senior living, you expect competent care. You don’t expect true friendship or deeply personal care.
- In eCommerce, you expect a package to arrive on time. You don’t expect the founder’s personal thank-you note inside.
- In B2B/professional services contexts, clients expect excuses or ass-covering when a mistake occurs. You don’t expect their partner/vendor to take accountability immediately, then make it right.
The beauty of expectation inversion is that it doesn’t require excess spending; just creativity and timing. You’re not competing on features, benefits, scale or quality – you’re competing on surprise and delight. And the beauty of those things is that they’re often inexpensive.
3. Emotional Relevance
Leverage moments work best when they intersect with emotionally loaded stages of the journey – pride, guilt, grief, nostalgia, joy, or fear. In marketing terms, they exist at the point where customer behavior is driven less by logic and more by limbic resonance. You can’t out-market human emotion, but you can leverage it.
The strongest brands systematize empathy: they build playbooks for when customers are most human, not when they’re most rational.
4. Memorability and Retell Value
A well-executed leverage moment isn’t a fleeting, one-off thing — it echoes. It creates a story your audience wants to retell because it reinforces something they want to believe about the world: that there are still companies capable of empathy, still people inside the big faceless corporate machine who genuinely care.
When someone tells that story, they’re not really promoting your brand; they’re reaffirming their own values. You’ve given them an experience that reflects who they aspire to be: thoughtful, human, caring, compassionate, decent.
That’s why these moments spread so fast and last so long.
People don’t share stories about efficiency. They share stories about decency.
They don’t repeat statistics. They repeat moments that made them feel something.
That’s the highest form of marketing – when your behavior becomes someone else’s content.
The Leverage Moments Playbook: A Six-Step Process for Designing Asymmetric Impact
Creating leverage moments isn’t luck; it’s the result of a specific playbook, applied within your organization. The truth is any brand can create these moments, if they choose to do so. Here’s how:
Step 1: Map the Emotional Journey
The playbook begins not with process, but with awareness.
Most organizations map customer journeys as workflows: inquiry → purchase → delivery → retention. It’s tidy, linear, measurable…and entirely robotic. People are the opposite. They’re not (despite our best efforts) logical. They’re emotional. They move through feelings.
Odds are, your audience oscillates between anticipation, fear, guilt, relief, excitement, nostalgia, joy and apprehension as they try to figure out what to do. Those emotional spikes almost never align with your operational stages.
Your objective should not be to eliminate those moments, but rather to identify a select few – one, two, three at most – where you can do something that meets the moment with meaning.
When we work with brands to create these moments, we start by mapping not just what happens, but how it feels to your audience to live through it.
When is your audience most hopeful? Most vulnerable? Most certain they’ll be met with indifference? Most ready for a fight? Positively convinced they’ll receive a canned, tone-deaf response? Those are the emotional peaks where the right intervention can have disproportionate impact.
Step 2: Identify the Default Pattern
For each of those moments, write down what everyone else in your industry normally does.
What’s the default behavior? The predictable, efficient, standardized response?
At this stage, what’s the “normal” thing to do?
- After a pet dies, most companies begrudgingly issue a refund
- When a child’s stuffy is lost, most hotels send you to lost & found
- After a resident passes, most communities send a final invoice
- Following a complaint, most brands send a templated pseudo-apology
That default response is the basis for your audience’s behavioral expectation – the “pattern” they expect their interaction with your brand, in that moment, to follow.
Step 3: Design the Countermove
Once you know the expected, design the countermove.
Ask yourself: “What experience would I want at this moment? If I could imagine a perfect response, what would it be?”
Don’t overcomplicate it. There’s beauty in simplicity.
If the default response is cold, do something warm, caring & personal.
If it’s generic, be specific.
If it’s policy-driven, make exceptions.
It doesn’t have to be – and often, shouldn’t be – expensive or elaborate. It just has to break the pattern your audience expects.
Eleven Madison Park did exactly that by sending over the coffee sommelier and treating coffee drinkers like real people. The Four Seasons learned that parents traveling with small children often expect to be rushed or hushed…so they do the opposite: they hand the child a small bunny the moment they walk in. It is a tiny gesture that immediately re-frames the experience for both the child (who is probably wondering where they are and what’s going on) AND the parent (who suddenly feels a bit more welcome and at ease, and less self-conscious about their kid’s behavior). Zappos found that most people positively loathe talking to customer service reps because they believe the reps can’t help them – so the company went out of their way to restructure how their call centers work and empower their reps to delight the customer, no matter what it took.
In each case, the intervention was relatively simple – a stuffy, a person who treats you like a person, a rep who is actually empowered to resolve your issue – but it makes all the difference because it’s unexpected.
Step 4: Build Commitment and Capacity
In all honesty, the first 3 steps are relatively easy and straightforward to execute. In order for a leverage moment to be effective, it can’t feel random or performative. It must feel cultural.
That requires two things: commitment and capacity.
Commitment is the organizational mandate to deliver the “countermove” every single time the situation arises. Inconsistency in high-leverage, emotionally-charged moments actually feels worse than the default/expected…because you hoped for something better, only to be let down.
Capacity is the infrastructure that makes it real. What are the requirements to execute this every time? What are the triggers to look for? What are the materials (if any) required to respond? How do we train this to our front-line staff, factory workers, customer success teams, whomever?
The combination of commitment and capacity creates consistency.
Step 5: Execute with Precision and Fairness
Once a leverage moment happens, it becomes a promise.
If one customer experiences the magic and another doesn’t, you’ve just created resentment — not loyalty. That’s why consistency matters more than creativity.
The goal isn’t personalization. It’s predictability. Every client/customer should feel that if the same situation happened again, the brand would respond the same way.
Step 6: Capture, Reflect, Repeat
Leverage moments aren’t the end of the journey; they’re feedback loops. After each one, capture it. Reflect on it. Then teach it. Ask:
- What triggered it?
- What emotion did it address?
- How was our response antithetical to our target audience’s expectation?
- What was the result, both emotionally and operationally?
Document these stories. Share them inside your company. Each story is both a proof point and an inspirational tale – it’s validation that the brand actually lives up to its promise.
Over time, these moments reinforce one another: a customer has a surprising/delightful experience → they share the story → others hear it → new customers arrive predisposed to believe → the brand delivers again → belief grows.
When done well, these systems of empathy produce economic returns so disproportionate they almost seem unfair.
The value of the word-of-mouth, earned media and emotional equity generated by true leverage moments often exceeds their cost by an order of magnitude.
Consider the Ritz-Carlton’s famous $2,000 Rule: any employee, at any property, can spend up to $2,000 per guest, per night to resolve an issue or create delight. On paper, it sounds extravagant. But in practice, it’s one of the most profitable operational policies in hospitality.
The aggregate brand value created by the thousands of stories guests have shared, each retold dinner-party anecdote, each group text sharing an act of care, each social post marveling at what the Ritz Carlton is willing to do to delight their guests likely dwarfs the total amount ever spent. The return on that investment isn’t 2x or 3x. It’s 10x or 100x.
Or take Chewy. When a customer calls to cancel an order after their pet passes, the company does three things: first, they refund the purchase with no questions asked. Then, two days later, flowers arrive along with a handwritten note from the rep you spoke with. All-in, that gesture likely costs $40 in total ($30 for a bouquet, $10 in cost of the latest order), but it generates millions in goodwill. I’ve experienced this as a pet owner. I’m never ordering pet food from another company ever again, even though doing so could save me (potentially) hundreds or thousands of dollars over my lifetime.
The lifetime value of a customer who receives that kind of emotional, personal, wonderful experience increases by orders of magnitude. And they don’t just keep buying – they tell their friends and colleagues about it. A few weeks ago in Las Vegas, I was sitting with a friend, who mentioned his dog had just passed about a month prior. He then went on to tell me – completely unprompted – about this wonderful company called Chewy that sent flowers, how his wife cried when reading the note and that he can’t recommend them enough.
Thinking back on the conversation, I don’t think he even mentioned the refund. What mattered was the compassion and empathy Chewy showed in that moment, not the money they got back.
Small acts of kindness and decency can go a long way, especially in today’s optimized, systematized, way-too-often-way-too-impersonal world.
Those stories – Ritz-Carlton’s $2,000 rule, Chewy’s compassion, the Four Seasons’ stuffies, Eleven Madison Park’s coffee, and the handful of others that live rent-free in our collective marketing memory – make leverage moments seem effortless. But the reality is they are not. Those moments are the outputs of systems wearing the mask of empathy. Behind every “wow” moment is structure, permission and discipline. The companies that consistently deliver them aren’t lucky, they’re insightful and operationally excellent.
Leverage moments are hyper-emotional, which makes them fragile and volatile.
Executed well, they feel serendipitous – effortless, genuine, almost poetic in their timing.
But executed inconsistently, those same acts start to feel like favoritism or unfairness, the kind of uneven experience that erodes trust faster than a core operational failure.
That’s why the brands that sustain these moments over time aren’t just empathetic; they’re disciplined. They treat humanity not as an act of kindness, but as a repeatable operational process. They build systems that make empathy inevitable.
Why?
Because if a moment feels magical to one customer but arbitrary to another, it stops being magic. That’s the quiet truth underpinning every legendary experience: consistency doesn’t kill the magic – it makes it.
When we work with brands to create these moments, this is the part I focus on the most: what are you willing to commit to doing every single time this moment arises for the next decade? This isn’t a thing you can A/B test. It isn’t a “surprise and delight” campaign you spin up and sunset. It’s a promise. Once you do it, you own it.
That’s why it matters so deeply to get it right.
It doesn’t have to be expensive. It doesn’t have to be fancy. It just has to be deliberate — and done every time.
This week’s issue is sponsored by Optmyzr.
While I usually include specific feature callouts in these sections, in the spirit of today’s issue, I wanted to do something a little different.
A few weeks ago, I was working with a client who needed to build a wildly complex set of automations for their Google Ads account. This was an account with something like 10,000 active keywords, and hundreds of ads, all of which needed to be modified in all sorts of ways (target adjustments, status adjustments, ad adjustments) based on dynamic pricing and availability.
Long story long: it was stupidly complicated.
I’ve been doing this long enough to know what usually happens in these situations. You email support, they drop a link to the documentation, maybe paste in a help article and wish you luck.
That’s not what happened here.
Instead, Juan from the Optmyzr team jumped on Zoom and spent hours walking through every component of the configuration – not just explaining it, but actually building it with me, step by step. Before we even got on the call, he’d already written custom scripts and tested the workflow himself, just to make sure everything worked exactly as intended.
It was a leverage moment in action. I expected a templated response. I got a personalized, fully-custom, above-and-beyond experience. We work with dozens of SaaS providers, and I’ve never gotten that kind of treatment from any other one.
If you’re thinking about what tool to add to your stack, give Optmyzr a try.
That’s all for this week!
Cheers,
Sam
