Why joy should be your business’s next competitive advantage

Let’s start with that word. Joyconomy.

No, it isn’t another one of my made-up joy words. I wish it was. Wunderman Thompson Intelligence first used it in The Future 100: 2023 to describe a growing appetite for joy and play at a time when the world was feeling increasingly uncertain.

I’ve been talking about the commercial value of joy for quite a while now, so you can imagine my delight when I came across not one, but two Forbes articles suggesting the rest of the world might finally be catching up.

In 2026: The Year of the Joy-Finders, Kate Hardcastle argueds that people are becoming more deliberate about seeking out things that make life feel better. She looked at how that desire is shaping what people buy and the experiences they choose. What I particularly liked was her point that joy needs to be considered in the design of an experience. People can tell when a business has truely given some thought to how they they want you to feel and when they have simply tried to grab your attention.

Then Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey went a step further with The Joyconomy Is Here. Is Your Leadership Ready?. Her argument is that this has become a question for leaders as well as brands. As AI takes on more of the work we used to think of as a competitive edge, she suggests that the human experience of a business will matter even more. That includes the people working inside it, as well as the people buying from it.

Finally. Quick, someone call the boredroom and wake them all up!

Both articles pick up on something that I know has been quietly building for a long time. People want businesses to do their jobs well, of course they do. But they’re also paying attention to how those businesses make life feel while they’re doing it. And if that feeling influences where people spend their money, who they trust and whether they come back, it seems rather odd that so many businesses still treat it as the fluffy bit. God I hate that word.

We’ve spent decades becoming very good at the serious work. Businesses are faster, easier to access and better at doing what they promise. We’ve improved the processes behind the scenes and found ways to measure almost everything that happens in front of them. Of course we have because nobody wants a joyful experience from a business that can’t actually do the job.

But everybody else has been improving as well. AI is making capable work easier to produce and expertise easier to access which means more businesses can meet the standard customers expect. Being good at what you do still matters enormously. It just isn’t always enough to make someone choose you.

So what does?

I keep coming back to this one in all my conversations - how you make them feel.

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Does joy actually convert?

VML’s Age of Re-enchantment research asked people what would make them more likely to buy from a brand. 49% said a brand that brought them a sense of joy, while 26% said one that simply did what it said it would. The same research found that 70% couldn’t remember the last time a brand did anything that excited them.

Those are answers about what people say would influence them, so I wouldn’t pretend they prove every joyful idea will turn into a sale. But they do make one thing fairly difficult to dismiss, people value the feeling a business creates and many businesses are leaving that feeling to chance.

My current biggest bug bear, is that joy is still getting a funny look in most places in business. Mention it in a boardroom and you can almost hear somebody reaching for the 'fluffy' word placard. Mention trust or loyalty and everyone sits up, even though the experience of dealing with a business is often part of how it earns both.

I think we’ve become so used to talking about business in numbers that we forget what the numbers are made of. A customer buys because they feel confident enough to go ahead. They come back because dealing with you felt good last time. They recommend you because the experience gave them something worth telling someone about.

The transaction appears on the spreadsheet. But the feeling that helped create it rarely does.

That, to me, is the bigger idea inside the Joyconomy. Joy has economic value.

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So the next battleground in business isn’t effectiveness. It’s affectiveness.

I’m not suggesting businesses should stop trying to be effective. Of course they shouldn’t. If someone pays you to solve a problem, you need to solve it.

But imagine two businesses that can both do the job equally well. One makes the whole experience feel uncertain and oddly hard work. But the other makes you feel understood from the first conversation and leaves you more confident than you were when you arrived. Which one would you rather deal with?

That’s what I call Affective Advantage™. It’s the advantage you build when the way your business makes people feel becomes part of the reason they choose you. Effectiveness proves you can do the job. Affectiveness makes someone want you to do it.

Back in the day, we used to talk about a brand’s look and feel. Somewhere along the way, I think we got rather better at discussing the look than the feel. We can debate a colour palette for hours, but often give far less thought to what someone feels when they read the first email, receive the proposal or ask for help after something’s gone wrong.

Being serious about what you do doesn’t mean you have to be emotionally distant while you’re doing it. It’s a lesson many businesses still haven’t learned.

The Joyconomy starts inside the business, too

There’s something else I don’t want to lose in all this talk about customers. The Joyconomy is more than a consumer trend. I think it asks business owners and leaders to reconsider the way they run the place.

You can’t expect people to create a warm, thoughtful experience for customers while making their own working lives relentlessly joyless. If the team has room to enjoy what they do and feels trusted to bring some personality to it, that changes the enerjoy inside the business. It can make people more willing to share an idea, try a different approach or put a little more care into a moment that might otherwise pass unnoticed.

That matters commercially as well. Research in the Forbes leadership article found that employees who enjoy their work were 49% less likely to consider leaving. I wouldn’t claim that adding a bit of fun fixes every problem at work. But it’s a fairly compelling reason to take the experience of your own people seriously, rather than thinking of joy as something you perform for customers after the team has clocked in.

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What kind of joy can only you create?

This is where I think businesses need to be careful. “Be human” isn’t specific enough. And “be joyful” isn’t necessarily specific enough either. If every business decided to add a few brighter colours and make its emails a bit chirpier, we’d end up with a lot of businesses that looked remarkably similar and felt strangely insincere.

The strategic question is: what kind of joy can only you create?

Joy isn’t always the big, obvious feeling we tend to picture. Sometimes it’s the joy in the confidence of knowing you’ve made the right decision. Sometimes it’s joy in the relief of finding someone who understands the problem or the reassuring joy that you’re in safe hands. Trust can be its own kind of joy when you’ve spent weeks wondering whether anyone will do what they promised.

For a children’s brand, joy might look like play. For somebody buying their first home, it might be a solicitor who makes the whole process feel less frightening. If you’re hiring a consultant because your business is in a muddle, it might be the moment you can finally see a way forward. Neither of those last two experiences needs a joke in the welcome email. Both could make somebody’s life feel considerably better.

Most businesses can tell you what they want customers to know about them. They can usually tell you what they want people to do next. But ask them how they want somebody to feel after dealing with them and the answer can get more than a little vague. That’s a fairly spectacular thing to overlook when you consider that the people buying from you are human beings.

It’s why I believe a business needs a strategy for feeling. At Wonderment, I call that Stratejoy™. We work out what people need to feel at the moments that matter and which of those feelings the business can genuinely create. Then, we make that decision part of the brand strategy, so joy becomes something more specific and useful than an instruction to “be more joyful”.

From there comes Enjoyneering™, designing that exact feeling into what people actually encounter. The words on your website have a part to play, but so does the way somebody answers a difficult question over the phone. Your proposal, your onboarding and all those easily overlooked moments can either reinforce the feeling you intended or quietly undo it. Treat these more like wondermoments and you won't go far wrong.

You can’t order people to feel something because you’ve written it in a strategy document. You have to give them a reason to feel it when they meet your business.

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The feeling comes before the figure

Businesses are rightly obsessed with ROI. We want to know whether the money we put in, produces a return. But before someone buys, comes back or recommends you, something usually happens that’s harder to put on the dashboard.

They feel something.

That’s why I talk about Return on Feeling™. What did the experience leave with them? Did it make a difficult decision feel easier? Did it give them confidence in you? Did they remember how you treated them when they had plenty of other choices?

I’m not proposing a magic formula where making someone smile automatically sends the sales graph upwards. People are more complicated than that. But if we’re serious about understanding why people choose a business, surely we ought to pay attention to the experience that led them there.

And as AI makes more of the functional work available to everyone, that question feels increasingly urgent. The technology behind a service may be easier to replicate. The particular feeling of dealing with the people who provide it is much harder.

So yes, the Joyconomy began with a name for people’s appetite for joy. But to me, it has become a shift in business philosophy. Joy and play deserve a place in how we think about the experience of a business, both for the people who buy from it and the people who make it work.

Your business is already making people feel something.

Have you decided what?

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I’m Sean Cornell, Founder and Brand Enjoyneer™ at Wonderment, the seriously joyful branding agency. I make businesses more effective by making their branding more affective, transforming fundamental businesses into wondermental brands.

If you’re serious about starting the joyvolution in your sector, we should talk.

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