My niece Valeria is three years old. On Sunday, she wore Princess Aurora’s dress to Disneyland. There’s a spot on the side of the castle, easy to miss if you’re not looking for it, where Disney stations its princesses to meet children and take photos. My brother took her there. She met Ariel, Jasmine, and Cinderella. She spotted Snow White walking nearby. Each princess greeted her, looked at her, spoke to her.
Afterward, Valeria told her mom, matter-of-factly: “The princesses love me.”
Not “I love the princesses.” Not “that was so fun.” Not even “I want to go back.” The princesses. Love. Her.
That sentence stopped me cold. Because what Valeria just described wasn’t a Disney experience. It was her own story, and Disney had engineered it that way on purpose.
This is the thing most businesses completely miss about customer experience. They obsess over the product, the service, the touchpoints, the NPS score. They want the customer to love them. Disney flipped the equation entirely. They don’t make children fall in love with Disney. They make children feel like Disney, all of it, the magic, the princesses, the castle, exists because of them. The customer isn’t the audience. The customer is the protagonist.
Disneyland has been around for 70 years. It has expanded to attract visitors of every age, background, and budget. But children remain the gravitational center of the whole operation, not because Disney is sentimental about childhood, but because Disney understands something brutally strategic: if you create a memory that a child carries for life, you have that family forever. Valeria won’t remember everything about Sunday. But she will remember that the princesses loved her. And someday, she’ll bring her own children to find out if the princesses love them too.
That’s not customer loyalty. That’s generational lock-in, built on a single moment that cost Disney almost nothing to design.
So here’s the question worth sitting with: does your customer walk away from an interaction with you thinking about your brand, or thinking about themselves? There’s a canyon between those two outcomes. Most companies are frantically working to make themselves memorable. Disney makes the customer feel memorable, and then disappears behind that feeling.
Think about what this actually requires. It requires knowing your customer so deeply that you can design moments where they feel seen, not as a segment, not as a persona, not as a user type, but as an individual who matters. Valeria wasn’t handed a pamphlet or a loyalty stamp. She was greeted by a princess who looked her in the eyes. The experience was built around her specific version of magic, not a generic one.
Most organizations can’t do this because they’re still designing experiences from the inside out, starting with what they want to deliver and working toward the customer. Disney designs from the outside in. They start with the emotional memory they want to create and reverse-engineer everything else from there. The question isn’t “what experience can we provide?” The question is “who does our customer want to be, and how do we make them feel like they already are that person?”
That’s a harder question. It requires more imagination, more customer intimacy, and more willingness to subordinate your brand to your customer’s story. But it’s also the question that separates companies that are remembered from companies that are merely used.
Valeria didn’t walk out of Disneyland talking about Mickey Mouse, Anna, Elsa, or the churros. She walked out knowing, with complete certainty, that she is the kind of girl that princesses love.
That’s the experience worth designing for.
