Videos
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The Psychology of Customer Experience - Ryan Hamilton, Emory University -
How do I discover if my customer has decided to buy?
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Ryan Hamilton, Emory Goizueta Business School: Wish Lists, Window Shopping, and Electronic Carts
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Fitness Tech Summit - Keynote by Ryan Hamilton
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What to Do if Behavioral Science Hasn’t Been Working For You - Business over Breakfast -
How perception plays a critical role in building a great Customer Experience
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5 Rules for forming a strong relationship with your customers via your brand!
Learn More About Ryan Hamilton
Ryan Hamilton is an associate professor of marketing at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. He received his Ph.D. in marketing from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. He is an award-winning teacher and researcher whose findings have been published in some of the top peer-reviewed journals in marketing and psychology, and covered in Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Financial Times and CNN Headline News. He has consulted on matters of pricing, branding, and customer experience with Walmart, FedEx, Home Depot, Caterpillar, ConAgra, Cigna, Visa, Estee Lauder and Ipsos, among others, and has been a keynote speaker and trainer on various topics in marketing and decision-making to groups as varied small business owners, lawyers, advertisers, accountants, and librarians.
Hamilton is the co-author of a forthcoming book called “The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things” (Harvard Business Review Press, June 2025), which explores the difficulty of managing the diverse needs of customers as brands grow. For the last 8 years he has co-hosted a podcast called The Intuitive Customer, which applies the insights from consumer psychology to effectively managing customer experiences.
Hamilton has also produced two popular lecture series for The Great Courses, a company that produces educational and entertaining college-level lectures by professors selected “exclusively for their ability to teach.” For his first course, Ryan taught the marketing component of “Critical Business Skills for Success,” an overview of the core business school curriculum. His second course, “How You Decide: The Science of Human Decision Making,” takes a practical approach to understanding all the factors that can influence how people make choices.
Hamilton has an eclectic background that includes both an undergraduate degree in physics and time spent performing stand-up and sketch comedy. In his spare time, such as it is, he is a woodworker. He has never run a marathon and has no intention of ever doing so.
Ryan Hamilton is available to advise your organization via virtual and in-person consulting meetings, interactive workshops and customized keynotes through the exclusive representation of Stern Speakers & Advisors, a division of Stern Strategy Group®.
The Growth Dilemma
Brands typically seek to grow by attracting new customers. But each new customer segment has different needs and preferences — that’s what makes them different segments — and so may want something different from the brand. According to Emory professor Ryan Hamilton, as new segments are added to the customer base, brands face the challenge of managing not just the relationship between the brand and its customers, but also managing the relationships between their customer segments. When customer segment relationships are managed correctly, growth will be cheaper, safer, and more enduring. When the relationships between segments are managed poorly, the results can be disastrous. Think of the success Subaru had in adding an LGBT segment to its existing customer base in the 1990s (Subaru moved from a struggling minor player to becoming the second fastest growing car brand in the 2010s), versus the explosive reaction of Bud Light’s customers when it pursued a similar-seeming strategy 20 years later (boycotts, steep decline in share price, knocked off its 20-year perch as the best selling beer in America). The difference was in the relationships between each brands’ customer segments.
Drawn from his upcoming book, “The Growth Dilemma,” (Harvard Business Press, June 2025), this presentation is highly customizable and can fit a range of topics and audiences. It is great for general business audiences wanting to learn more about growth strategies or growth marketing. Hamilton argues for a new business discipline: Customer Segment Relationship Management (CSRM), which is focused on understanding how customer segments will interact with each other. In one version of the session, he emphasizes how to avoid problems, but also how to identify opportunities for multiplicative growth through properly managing customer segment relationships. Highly tactical, this presentation is especially appealing to those interested in consumer psychology and customer experience.
In variants on this session, Hamilton focuses on the different sources of conflict between customer segments, how to identify them and how they can avoid and escape “the conflict zone.” Marketers of all stripes, retailers, and CX professionals might be interested in that version of the talk. Using vivid examples and case studies, he customizes his sessions to industries including tech, professional services, traditional CPG, B2B, entertainment and more.
Building a Better Brand
Too often, marketers focus on the tactics of brand building, rather than rooting their brands in marketing strategy. Brands are so much more than a list of creative decisions (color, font, logo, etc.) codified in a file managed by the legal department. In this presentation, Emory Professor Ryan Hamilton draws on his expertise in consumer psychology to argue that the best way to think of your brand is as a memory structure in the minds of your customers. As such, managing a brand is really about managing your customers’ memories. Using examples from a range of brands and a nice mix of psychology and practical guidance, Hamilton explores how memories are formed and reinforced, and how they can change over time.
You are (Still) Probably Doing Segmentation Wrong: Segmentation Based on Customer Value, Not on Demographics
Too often (still!), firms segment their markets largely on demographic, geographic and behavioral characteristics, without getting to the root of what those segments want. What do they value? What problems are they trying to solve? What drives their purchase decisions? If your segmentation can’t answer these questions, you’ve missed the point of segmentation. The problem is that demographic information is nearly always non-diagnostic of preferences. And it gets even worse when we are talking about targeting super broad groups of people like Millennials or Gen Z. Trying to target a generation is roughly as effective as trying to target an astrological sign. In this presentation, Emory professor Ryan Hamilton advocates for value-based segmentation: grouping people according to what they want and not according to what they look like. He discusses the various ways values-based segmentation intersects with demographic information, and how marketers can derive maximum insights about their customers on their way to reaching their sales goals.
Making Behavioral Science Work for You
There has been an explosion of interest in behavioral science over the past 15 years. This presentation by Emory professor Ryan Hamilton includes everything from behavioral economics and consumer psychology to “nudges” and choice architecture. People read the books and watch the TED Talks, but when they go to apply these insights in their businesses and in their personal lives, they often find that these insights don’t work for them. In this highly engaging session, Hamilton emphasizes that understanding the principles or theory is not enough. To successfully transition from academic journals to real life, we also need to understand the boundaries around those theories and the conditions under which those principles hold. He lays out a set of guidance for making behavioral science more practical, increasing the chances that it will actually work for you when you need it to.
Understanding Habits
Understanding human habits has wide application to businesses — by some estimates, as much as 45% of customers’ shopping is habitual — but also to personal improvement. In this highly relevant session, Emory professor Ryan Hamilton reveals that understanding how habits are formed and broken is interesting to everyone including marketers looking to change consumer behavior, managers looking to shake employees out of unhelpful behaviors, and ourselves when we try to figure out why it is so hard to make ourselves go to the gym in the morning. One of Hamilton’s most popular sessions, he draws on the latest psychological research and provides varied examples from consumer and non-consumer domains to illustrate key learnings and practical guidance.
The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things
(Harvard Business Review Press, June 2025)
The Intuitive Customer: 7 Imperatives For Moving Your Customer Experience to the Next Level
(Palgrave Macmillan, August 2016)
Advance Praise for "The Growth Dilemma"
"Wilson and Hamilton have given us a way of getting serious about growing our customer base and our brand. 'The Growth Dilemma' provides a unique perspective on changing the way we see and understand customers. This is an invaluable read when you're in the thick of transforming a brand with history and legacy, and it provides critical insights for growth for any brand size."
"'The Growth Dilemma' is essential reading for any marketer trying to grow a brand and attract new customer segments. It offers a new perspective on customer segment psychology and management, and a fresh and actionable framework for understanding your brand's customer base and guiding growth strategies."
"Wilson and Hamilton bring fresh, practical insights to a critically important but surprisingly neglected topic—customer segment management. An invaluable addition to any marketer's tool kit, 'The Growth Dilemma' offers comprehensive, actionable advice to help marketers maximize synergies and minimize conflicts across their customer base."
"'The Growth Dilemma' redefines marketing with a fresh, consumer-centric model, encouraging us to think more deeply about the role our brands play in people's lives. Packed with memorable examples and unexpected humor, it's a rare business book that's genuinely enjoyable to read."
"'The Growth Dilemma' is a comprehensive manual for assessing growth opportunities and teaching the dos and don'ts of creating growth strategies. It's filled with both classic and contemporary examples and just the right amount of snark to keep you entertained. This book is a welcome addition to marketing courses for undergrads, MBAs, and executives."
