Insights

Measuring what customers feel: the next strategic imperative for GCC brands.

IRIS Witness · July 2026

The Gulf has entered its experience era. Across the region, growth is increasingly driven by how a visit feels rather than by what a shelf contains.

The UAE hospitality market is projected to grow from USD 30 billion in 2026 to nearly USD 44 billion by 2031, according to Mordor Intelligence, powered by rising demand for personalised guest experiences. Euromonitor projects UAE luxury spending to grow around 9 percent a year through 2030, with experiential luxury leading the way. And a remarkable shift is underway in retail: the share of high income consumers who prefer shopping fashion in store rose from 36 percent in 2023 to 52 percent in 2025. Customers are coming back to physical places for one reason. They want to feel something.

This creates a new strategic question for managing directors and owners. Revenue, footfall and conversion are measured with precision. Emotion, the very thing customers now come for, usually remains invisible in the reporting pack.

Consider what a leadership team typically knows about last month: sales by location, average basket, mystery shopping scores if a program exists. Now consider what it rarely knows: how the welcome felt to a first time visitor, at which exact moment a hesitant buyer decided to trust the salesperson, what a loyal customer sensed had changed in her favourite spa. These moments decide loyalty, referral and lifetime value. In an economy where 87 percent of GCC customers move fluidly between online and offline channels, as Oliver Wyman reports, the physical visit is precisely where brands win or lose their premium.

Emotion can be measured. It requires three conditions.

• 1A real customer as the observerThe observer must be a genuine customer of the brand universe, matched to the real customer profile, because a visitor who would naturally shop elsewhere lives a different experience.
• 2Feedback captured instantly, on cameraThe feedback must be recorded immediately after the visit, while the memory is intact and the emotion still visible in the voice and the face.
• 3Expert analysis, amplified by technologyThe analysis must combine expert human judgement with modern emotion reading technology, so that a leadership team receives both the story and a number it can track over time.

This is the foundation of the IRIS Witness method, developed after twelve years of customer experience evaluation worldwide, and of the Emotional Variance Index, our proprietary measure of how customer emotion moves across a visit. Together they turn something leaders have always sensed intuitively into something they can watch, quantify and improve, location after location, quarter after quarter.

They apply to it the same discipline they apply to financial performance. The tools now exist. The question for every leadership team is simple: do you know what your customers felt yesterday?