I’m always seeking out new ideas, winning formulas, and genuine collaboration within the jewellery industry. Observing this industry for over ten years has been fascinating, and I’m dedicated to helping independent retailers and suppliers reach new heights.

In a landscape of rising costs and declining footfall, creating an environment that stands out as extraordinary has become essential to success in the jewellery industry.

Beyond Jewellery: The New Competitive Landscape

We’re not just competing with other jewellery businesses anymore; we’re competing against entire other industries, including luxury fashion, travel, beauty, and tech. To compete with these industries, we need to create unforgettable experiences that deliver more emotional impact than anything else in retail.

What Is Reverse Benchmarking?

Reverse benchmarking is a key to unlocking emotional impact points that will last a lifetime and elevate your brand above others.

When looking for ways to elevate our service level, we often look at what our competitors are doing well and try to imitate it in our own way.

This poses a problem: those things have already been done to perfection by your competitors, so it’s extremely difficult to improve on what they’ve already done, and they’ve often been adopted in the market so widely that they’ve become a minimum expectation and not something that will distinguish you as extraordinary.

Reverse benchmarking is a different way of identifying what could take your business to the next level. By reverse benchmarking, you can identify something that is usually an insignificant aspect of the customer journey and double down on it to create a lasting impression, which can turn a normal customer into a loyal brand advocate. It’s a way of optimising for surprise and delight moments that have an incredibly high perceived value disproportionate to the actual cost.

The Psychology of Value

Try to remember that customer perception of value is not logical; it’s psychological. A £50 unexpected gesture can create more perceived value than a £500 discount. Timing, for example, can make a huge difference to how a gesture is perceived.

For example, you could arrange for the happy couple to receive a surprise bottle of bubbly or a complimentary jewellery care package after the wedding day. Imagine receiving a surprise gift from your favourite jeweller when the hustle and bustle of the day has calmed down; that is when a gesture would stand out as extraordinary.

It transforms giving a gift at the point of purchase, which is an inherently transactional gesture, into a thoughtful gesture where the customer feels valued and remembered on a personal level beyond the four walls of your business.

Rethinking the Customer Journey

The idea is to stop obsessing only over product, price, and efficiency. Look for a new frame of reference by measuring emotional impact instead of financial impact; the goal when reverse benchmarking should be to find new and under-utilised ways to make your customers feel seen, not processed.

Waiting areas, aftercare services, the coffee you offer, the unboxing experience, payment processing, all of these are areas that can be incredibly underwhelming aspects of the customer journey. What could you do to make them exceptional, out of the ordinary, or unreasonably good when compared with the purchase price?

Look outside of our industry and investigate how other sectors make their customers feel valued beyond the amount of money they’ve spent. It’s putting the focus less on what your customers feel about you and more about how they believe you feel about them.

Lessons from Outside the Industry

If you need more inspiration when you’re reverse benchmarking, look up Will Guidara’s book ‘Unreasonable Hospitality’. In his book, you are given an insight into how he took his New York restaurant from the 50th best restaurant in the world (not bad) to 1st.

It wasn’t changing the food that helped them climb the list; it was the ruthless search for unexpected ways to delight the customer.

Another proponent of reverse benchmarking is Rory Sutherland. He founded Ogilvy’s behavioural science practice, focusing on understanding consumer psychology and the often irrational motivations behind decisions made by consumers.

Conclusion

In summary, I believe a little bit of reverse benchmarking could elevate this industry that already offers such an exceptional service to a whole new level.

Do you already have something that would be classed as unreasonable hospitality, or have you come across the idea of reverse benchmarking before? I love hearing about what people are already doing successfully and starting conversations that could help to unlock that next level.

Elliot Broad

The Jewels Club Take

Reverse benchmarking isn’t just a strategy — it’s a mindset shift. The jewellery industry has long focused on product and price, but the brands that will win next are those that understand emotional value. The opportunity isn’t to compete harder — it’s to think differently.