Online event
The emotion economy: how to build trust that actually converts in Australia and New Zealand
Tuesday 10 November at 9:00AM
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This session explores what consumers are really buying when they buy from a brand, how trust is built commercially rather than simply communicated, and where UK brands often lose customers in Australia and New Zealand despite having invested heavily to acquire them.
What you’ll learn
- Understand the difference between a brand being purchased on emotional default versus cognitive habit, the four factors that drive the former, and which one a business is truly competing on.
- Explore the emotional journey customers take when making purchasing decisions, including hesitation, confirmation, reassurance, and safety, and why each stage creates additional challenges for brands without an established market presence.
- Learn a practical framework, R.I.C.E., that businesses can apply to assess their brand readiness before investing in ANZ expansion, and the insights it can reveal.
Description
Most UK brands entering Australia and New Zealand arrive with a distribution plan, a pricing position and a marketing budget, and all three can be right while the business still fails to gain the expected traction. Consumers make decisions based on emotion and then justify them with logic afterwards. For a brand that is new to the market, every customer interaction starts with hesitation.
Speakers
Nick Gray
Founder & CEO, IGU Global
Nick Gray is the Founder and CEO of IGU Global, a Sydney-based retail strategy consultancy. He has spent 25 years working within the retail sector across Australia and New Zealand, beginning his career at adidas New Zealand before holding senior roles with Diesel, Nike, Sneakerboy and Westfield.
His work focuses on the intersection of consumer psychology and retail strategy, based on the belief that brand performance is fundamentally an emotional engineering challenge rather than a marketing exercise, and that trust functions as commercial infrastructure rather than simply a communications outcome.
Nick was named a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert for 2026 and regularly speaks across Australia, New Zealand and Asia on consumer decision-making, trust, and the role of AI in retail.