4 Brands Delivering Unique Value to Customer Experiences in 2025

Now halfway through the 2020s, it’s still hard to predict what will be the commonalities that define standout businesses of the decade. The aftermath of the pandemic and rapid advancements in AI and automation set against a backdrop of near-constant political and cultural conflict has, if nothing else, led to an innovation boom. Where the 2010s were spent trying to get customers to stay clicking around on e-commerce websites as long as possible, today’s winning brands compete fiercely to save customers time and make their lives easier. Of the dozens of standout brands to highlight, we’ve selected the four below for understanding what customers value most: their time. 

Thrive Market

When we innovate on customer experiences, it often isn’t about creating a new kind of experience, it’s about improving inefficiencies in experiences that already exist. In fact, chatbots have demonstrated that even experiences that customers should like on paper, when new and foreign, have to be of a very high quality to garner successful results. Food and meal delivery services are a crowded market, but brands that rise above the noise do so by relying on more than just convenience. Thrive Market has built a reputation of customer obsession by blending the attention on health and environmental causes of boutique grocery stores with the wholesale Costco model that guarantees low-price goods. Customers are happy to pay the annual $60 fee because the highly detailed filters allow them to seek out quality products that meet the criteria they’re looking for: allergen-free, diet compatibility, low climate impacts, SNAP eligibility, and more. Bundle this optionality with free shipping over $49 (usually) and guilt-free eco-friendly packaging delivered in just two days, and this grocery shopping experience is in a league of its own.

Total Wine

The liquor store market in the US is dominated by state and local chains, and customer loyalty to individual liquor stores is one of the last remaining relics of a bygone era of American shopping culture. Wine and liquor prices can be held low for even mom-and-pop stores for two reasons: long-standing businesses often have established relationships with sales representatives from liquor companies, and liquor and wine are by nature wholesale products, which tend to have less price variation. Total Wine, a big box wine and liquor store (that also sells drinking-adjacent snacks, accessories, and cigars) is able to undercut smaller stores pricing by procuring at scale. Total Wine is further able to disrupt local stores’ customer relationships by offering a balance of high-value human interactions with high-tech, efficient experiences. Inside the stores, knowledgeable and friendly sales people provide just the right amount of detail in recommendations, complemented by creative signage with pairing information. For customers who value expediency, their well-organized online ordering and same day delivery system allows for a low-touch experience at the same low prices. The recipe for high quality customer experiences is sometimes simple; notably good service and competitive pricing are enough to turn heads.

Zocdoc

Organizations that come up against American healthcare regulations often struggle to cut through red tape and provide frictionless, meaningful customer experiences. Complex medical record systems, privacy laws like HIPAA, and the sheer number of individuals employed in healthcare administrative roles at hospitals and other institutions are just some of the variables that tend to make healthcare experiences a general headache for patients and caregivers. To say Zocdoc makes it easy is an understatement. According to their data, patients look at, on average, 26 different provider options before booking an appointment. While this process takes mere minutes in the Zocdoc mobile app, it can take hours when done manually. Before Zocdoc, patients had to navigate different websites and healthcare system portals, all while filtering for their insurance plan and the provider identities they’re comfortable with, and then separately research providers’ reviews just to make an appointment they feel good about. Zocdoc serves as a near-perfect illustration of how products that save customers’ time on tedious tasks without compromising on the output will always generate intense demand in today’s busy world. 

Partiful

Before our Facebook feeds became inundated with ads and AI-generated images, the site had a good deal of useful features. One of which, Facebook Events, was the premier digital method for organizing small-to-medium size free events from 2005 through the mid 2010s. Numerous websites and platforms have sought to fill the gap for free events when Facebook Events lost popularity, but the ease of use was never quite there, and the gap remained wide open. Enter Partiful in 2020, an app that revived the most compelling features of Facebook Events with their own creative and fresh user interface. What differentiates Partiful from free versions of other ticketing platforms is the vested interest in cultivating connections between people. Partiful aptly recognizes that when you’re invited to a party, seeing who else is going is just as important as the address and start time (if not more so). When you’re hosting an event on Partiful, the UI encourages you to send out invites across your (social) network, listing attendees from past events you’ve attended alongside your contacts as suggested invitees. It offers features like event announcements and instant text blasts, one-click invites and integrated crowdfunding. The platform balances fun, light-hearted branding with an extremely easy-to-use interface, which helps achieve that elusive goal of a digital tool actually adding to the user experience, rather than detracting from it. It’s clearly working, as Partiful was named Google’s Best App of 2024. 

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