SPINMANTV.ME

Every brand says they care about people. Almost none of them prove it.

Read a piece by Heather Freiser in Ad Age this week, “Why Hospitality Is Advertising’s Most Human Competitive Advantage,” and it kind of stopped me in my tracks. She’s a former restaurateur turned agency person, and her whole point was that hospitality, the actual human skill of making someone feel looked after, is one of the most overlooked strategic capabilities an agency or a company can build. Not a value on a wall. An actual skill. Something you practise.

And I reckon she’s onto something bigger than advertising.

I’ve spent my career sitting between people and businesses, and here’s what I’ve noticed. The companies that win long term aren’t the ones with the best deck or the slickest positioning. They’re the ones where you can feel, right from the first conversation, that the person on the other end is actually paying attention to you. Not performing attention. Actually giving a stuff about what you need and whether they can genuinely help.

That’s hospitality. It’s not a hotel thing or a restaurant thing, it’s a way of showing up. It’s remembering what someone told you three weeks ago and bringing it back up unprompted. It’s saying “that’s not right for you” even when saying yes would’ve been easier. It’s picking up the phone instead of hiding behind a templated email.

And so the companies that treat hospitality as the starting point, not the customer service department, not a value statement, but the actual operating principle for every single interaction, those are the ones people stay loyal to. Because at the end of the day, everyone can say they put people first. Almost nobody organises their whole business around it.

The gap between saying it and doing it is where the real advantage lives. And in a world that’s getting more automated by the month, that gap is only going to get more valuable, not less.

Worth a read if this resonates: her piece in Ad Age.

What’s the last interaction with a company that actually made you feel looked after? Genuinely curious what that looked like for other people.