People often say things used to feel better. Not necessarily richer, but fuller. Christmas in New York in the 90s felt like a city competing with the stars. Even public institutions offered small dignities: free coffee, small comforts, gestures that suggested society cared about more than the balance sheet.

Then came the era of lean thinking.
Everything required justification. Every service needed a price tag. Decorations became “unnecessary spend.” Coffee became a cost line. Leaders were told to treat departments like micro-businesses. Margins ruled everything.

What changed wasn’t only budgets. It was philosophy.

Chasing cost coverage is a defensive mindset. It assumes fragility: We can’t afford generosity.
But the data—and human psychology—paint a different picture. When organisations strip away the small, symbolic gestures, they erase the emotional glue that creates trust, loyalty, and belonging. You end up with efficient systems that feel brittle, transactional, and strangely empty.

Businesses that dare to give more than the spreadsheet says they should aren’t being naive. They’re playing a different, longer game. When a brand behaves generously, people feel it. They remember it. They talk about it. And they forgive far more when something goes wrong.

Generosity, as it turns out, is a profit strategy—just not one that fits neatly into a quarterly report.

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Here’s the proof: generosity outperforms efficiency

This isn’t nostalgia. There is hard data behind the idea that “value > cost-cutting.”

McKinsey: Customer experience drives growth

McKinsey shows that companies investing in customer experience grow revenues 2–7× faster than those who don’t—and see 30–50% higher customer satisfaction.
Link: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-three-building-blocks-of-successful-customer-experience-transformations

Harvard’s Service–Profit Chain

Classic, repeatedly validated research:
Investing in employee satisfaction and customer experience → higher loyalty → increased profitability.
Overview: https://openstax.org/books/principles-marketing/pages/11-2-the-service-profit-chain-model-and-the-service-marketing-triangle

Bain & Company: Loyalty is a profit multiplier

A 5% increase in retention can increase profits 25–95%. That jump doesn’t come from cost-cutting—it comes from value, trust, and emotional loyalty.
Link: https://hbr.org/2014/10/the-value-of-keeping-the-right-customers

Academic research on Customer Delight

“Delight”—providing positive surprise or value beyond the expected—significantly boosts loyalty and retention, above and beyond satisfaction.
Study (2022):
https://growingscience.com/beta/uscm/5458-customer-satisfaction-customer-delight-customer-retention-and-customer-loyalty-borderlines-and-insights.html

A 2025 literature review of 161 studies confirms delight is a reliable driver of long-term loyalty across industries.
Review: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14783363.2025.2469294

Digital loyalty studies echo the same pattern

Even in digital environments—where cost-efficiency dominates—value, personalization, and experience quality remain key drivers of retention.
Study (2025): https://www.mdpi.com/0718-1876/20/2/71

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The deeper truth behind the data

When a company offers something that feels “more than necessary”—a small luxury, a human touch, a sense of abundance—it signals confidence and care. These things don’t always have direct ROI on day one. They have long-term compounding effects:

• Customers stay longer
• They recommend the brand
• They forgive missteps
• They spend more
• They form emotional attachment

Cost-cutting rarely produces any of that. In fact, it often does the opposite: it accelerates churn, erodes trust, and cheapens the brand.

The irony is almost poetic: companies chase efficiency to become stronger, but they often become weaker because of what they cut.

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Bringing generosity back into business

The question for modern organisations isn’t “How do we reduce costs further?”
It’s: Where can we afford to give more than the spreadsheet says makes sense?

Because those pockets of generosity—those unnecessary but unforgettable touches—are not expenses. They’re assets. The kind that compound. The kind competitors can’t copy easily. The kind customers talk about years later.

We might not return to New York’s 1990s-level Christmas lights or universally free hospital coffee, but the principle stands:

A little value, given freely, builds more brand equity than a thousand efficiency initiatives.

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