Our POV from CES 2025: The Moment to Build Your Personal Experience Brand is Now

By Katy Gajewicz , Chief Strategy Officer and Alex Helfers , EVP, Head of Connected Experiences 

True to form, this year's CES brought together cool tech, dynamic brands, and industry thought leaders in a forum designed for non-stop stimulation and collaboration. Not surprisingly, with the added energy of Sin City and the Sphere, AI was the star of the show. Its meteoric rise to the mainstream is being leveraged to fuel technological advancements. 

While the allure of the sexy gadgets, shiny new toys and awe-inspiring innovations is inescapable, what truly dominates our thoughts as we reflect on the CES experience is the broader implication of the event content as it relates to the work we do at Laughlin Constable to build brands. 

New Tech Can Help Build Personal Experience Brands  

There was much talk during the conference about unlocking greater personalization through data and technology. However, we would argue that what’s really happening goes beyond personalization. At Laughlin Constable, we believe the most modern, relevant brands are Personal Experience Brands, or as we refer to them, PXBs. These are brands that go beyond mere data-driven name and transactional personalization to truly create a personal experience.  

The concept of a Personal Experience Brand levels up personalization to Making it Personal, a higher-order, more strategic ambition to create deeper, more meaningful emotional and rational brand connections. While the ability to use data to address customers by name or deliver relevant recommendations are all valuable endeavors that we have all grown to expect from brands, being a PXB requires a deeper commitment to the art and science of brand building and customer experience strategy, and a relentless focus on executing those strategies across your business, to make every moment of a customer’s experience with your brand a more resonant one than the last. 

Leveraging AI to Go Beyond Personalization to Truly Make It Personal 

It may seem counter-intuitive that we connect the meteoric rise of artificial intelligence with the ability to make brand experiences more personal. But this new technology is trained on the compilation of human internet intelligence. In fact, it's the first technology that feels truly human because it's trained on the output of humanity. As a result, it can better understand people as individuals. And the more data you have on the individual, the more you can use that to make their brand experience more personal. The technology now, because of advancements in AI, is allowing us to do that better, faster, and more accurately. When used strategically, the technology that powers AI has the ability to be a force multiplier for creating Personal Experience Brands. 

CES shone a bright light on AI and its ability to power greater personal experiences. It made it crystal clear to us that the creation of Personal Experience Brands is having a watershed moment. We are at an inflection point that is facilitating greater potential for any brand to be a PXB, a critical moment for all brands who have the ambition to create the deepest, most personal relationship with their customers. 

All Brands Can Leverage Technology to Offer a More Personal Experience 

CES 2025 was, as always, a playground for some of the biggest technology brands today. What sparked our interest most, however, were the stories that were told about non-tech brands, and how non-tech brands, large and small, across a range of industry verticals, are using technology to make it personal. And they’re using technology to build their brands in a way that touches upon each of the five dimensions of a PXB: 

Inspirational:  

The brand relates to its consumer values by expressing and demonstrating why it exists, what it believes and what makes it special to them. 

Human-Centered:  

The brand clearly keeps consumer needs in mind when developing its advertising and new products and services. 

Contextually Useful: 

The brand shows up in consumers’ daily lives and meets their needs in the right ways, in the right places, and at the right times. 

Culturally Connected: 

The brand demonstrates that it has its finger on the pulse of cultural topics and trends that matter to consumers. 

Dynamic: 

The brand is continually evolving, innovating and adapting with the changing world to remain relevant to its consumers. 

Our Picks That Made It Personal with Technology at CES 2025 

Here are just a few callouts of brands that shared exciting ways they’re using technology to optimize their experience across one or more of the dimensions that make it personal for their consumers: 

Home DIY (Lowe’s) 

While the home DIY category runs the risk of brands resorting to functional and utilitarian experiences, which one may assume then makes it hard to be a PXB, this traditionally non-tech brand showed up with an exciting innovation toward demonstrating it understands and anticipates the needs of the humans with whom the brand seeks to connect.  

Lowe’s showcased its new Digital Home Platform, in which users can store information about their properties in the retailer’s rewards app, bringing together the different data points of a consumer and their home to create a human-centered platform that is not only a part of their lives, but it helps them live their lives. In doing so, it creates a utility for the brand that is unprecedented in the category. 

Travel & Hospitality (Delta, Hilton) 

Admittedly, the travel and hospitality industries have been technology adopters for years, but today, they are advancing exponentially to transform the travel experience in ways that go beyond personalization to truly making it personal. 

Delta's CEO Ed Bastian spoke broadly about Delta’s ambition to “lift people up” with the support of innovation and then showcased examples ranging from a new AI-powered in-flight concierge service to a tech-fueled plan for uniting the entire customer journey. With seamless, full-experience itineraries and even coordinated home-to-airport transportation, Delta is expanding the definition of what it means to travel with their company. 

Hilton’s CMO Mark Weinstein spoke about a range of current and potential ways the hotel chain embraces new technology—from creating more personalized room experiences to leveraging quantum computing for marketing communications. Through it all, he stressed the importance of using technology to strengthen the genuine human interactions the Hilton business relies on. 

Health & Wellness (AHA, ACS, Alzheimer’s Association, Smile Train) 

Healthcare is inevitably under scrutiny for how brands are solving for humanity’s most crucial problems. CES put a spotlight on several extremely purpose-driven brands that are using tech, AI and data to supercharge their problem-solving at the most personal level. 

CEOs from 4 major healthcare nonprofits—American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, the Alzheimer’s Association, and Smile Train—teamed up on a panel to discuss how they are embracing new technology to improve the patient and provider experience. For example, Smile Train uses virtual reality technology to help train surgeons and digital tools to connect patients in remote areas for cleft palate treatments. As another example, the American Cancer Society has teamed up with Google Cloud to enhance accuracy in identifying image scan patterns, aimed to improve accuracy and planning for cancer diagnoses. New technology offers immense power to help solve humanity’s most crucial healthcare challenges, but all four of these CES panel experts expressed that the common goal of this technology-fueled evolution was to enhance their organization’s ability to meet the personal needs of the patients and providers their organizations serve. 

Smaller brands 

In a world where AI and technology are rapidly leveling the playing field, it’s not only the big brands that are capitalizing on the potential to make brand experiences more personal. These examples range across industry verticals but are all connected in the way smaller companies are leveraging new tech and making a splash on the CES stage. 

Kristen Reitzell of Jackson Family Wines led a broad discussion around digital marketing innovation and how they are making their brand resonate at a more personal level with younger members of their target audience. This required taking a closer look at the customer journey and engaging those customers not only in tasting rooms and on their website but at restaurants, festivals and other interconnected touchpoints. The power of technology to enable this ecosystem of personalized communication has been critical for taking full advantage of the web Jackson is casting. “Your consumer is in all these places,” Reitzell stressed, “and they want to see you in all these places. If they are a superfan, they are going to come along with you on that ride.” 

OnMed’s “Clinic-in-a-box" solution earned them the prestigious CES Picks award for developing tech-enabled hybrid care aimed at helping the 83 million Americans who lack healthcare access across the country. These 8.5 x 11-foot boxes require only an electrical outlet to function and already exist in underserved communities and locations such as homeless shelters, county jails and community centers across six states. OnMed plans to expand to 30 states by the end of 2025.  

Dreo’s newest Polyfan, the 707S, is a poster child for making a fan experience personal. Their newest model uses AI to detect where you are in the room and to adjust direction, even as you move around. It also detects how far away you are for precise airflow amount. And it has a multi-person mode to ensure everyone in the room gets airflow.  

Our Perspective on Brand Experiences: Making It Personal Isn’t Only for Big Tech

In 2024, we launched the PXB-Factor™, our proprietary tool reflecting our agency philosophy. It serves as a playbook for building resonant, timeless brands and is an empirical proof point for the effectiveness of our work.   

What we see, and what this year’s CES reinforced, is that creating a Personal Experience Brand isn’t reserved for technology brands. Sure, technology brands like Amazon, Google, and Apple leverage the creation of an intelligent ecosystem of seamlessly connected products and services that synthesize and simplify all aspects of our physical and digital lives. This is at the heart of why people feel such connectivity and love for these brands: They have been so smart about a human-centered, data-centered approach to the building of an ecosystem of products and services that are all, in some way, without us even knowing it, connecting us to those brands. Through the artful use of data and technology, they do this better than others —because they can. And AI innovation is only going to make this more powerful—a force multiplier for strategic intelligence. 

However, this notion of ecosystems and their impact on personal experiences isn’t limited to tech brands. As we see in our PXB-Factor™ Report, brands like Nike, in particular, and Starbucks have managed to create an advantage in their categories by putting data at the center and allowing it to inform everything they do as a brand. 

Every brand has the opportunity to be a PXB; they just don’t all take advantage of it. Measuring and activating upon your PXB-Factor™ isn’t about trying to be Amazon or Nike. It’s about your brand being the most personal version of itself within your competitive set and business model. Today, more than ever, technology can empower brands to connect rationally and emotionally with consumers. To create brand experiences that make it personal.