BTB PERSPECTIVES: As brands spend billions creating ever more elaborate experiences, one question remains: Is anyone actually having a good time? Kristy Castleton, Founder of experiential agency Rebel & Soul, explores why luxury needs to move beyond spectacle and start creating memories that last.
Experience is luxury’s favourite word at the moment. Every flagship, every launch, every activation is promising one. But people have now walked through enough beautiful rooms to know that beautiful and memorable are not the same thing, which leaves our industry with a slightly awkward question. If nobody can retrieve it a month later, what exactly did all that money buy?
The best experience I’ve ever been to cost a fraction of what I’ve spent on a single reveal moment. It was a pop-up dinner in London built entirely around being a child again. You mixed your own drink at a medicine cabinet stocked with Calpol bottles full of rosemary syrup. There were posh fish fingers, and next to the peas, a pea shooter, so you could fire garden peas at complete strangers. The last course arrived in cardboard boxes, with instructions to open them on the count of three and do whatever we liked with the contents, which turned out to be paper plates and squirty cream. I have told that story to hundreds of people. I could not tell you the name of the venue.
We tend to judge our work by whatever is easiest to see. How lovely the room looked, how much it cost, how many people photographed it, what happened on Instagram for two days afterwards. All perfectly real signals, and not one of them tells you whether anything stuck.
Which is why memory is the only test I trust. If storyliving is the promise, memory is the proof.
Walking into a brand world is not the same as living inside its story. You can stand in the middle of the most spectacular installation ever built and still be nothing more than a very well-dressed spectator. It starts to become yours the moment there’s something to choose, something to wait for, something to contribute, or something that only happens because you turned up. Give me something to do, not just something to stand in front. It’s the difference between creating a beautiful installation and luxury storytelling that makes people feel something.
INVOLVE, our neuroscience framework, came out of exactly that kind of noticing. I went back through the experiences I could still see in high definition years afterwards and lined them up against what neuroscience says about how a memory actually gets laid down and kept. The same seven ingredients kept turning up: intrigue, novelty, vividness, organisation, liveliness, variety and emotion, which is where the name comes from. The framework did not invent any of that; it named it and gave us something to design against.
Then we spent six months finding out whether it held up outside my own head, because I was tired of arguing this from instinct. Experiences built around emotional peaks, deliberate surprise and sensory design that agreed with the message came out up to 52% more memorable than work designed mainly to look impressive. A month later, they were still holding around 26% recall, while the conventional work had already slipped to 17%.
So now we interrogate an idea long before it reaches a guest. What’s going to grab attention? Where does anticipation actually begin? Where is the emotional peak, and is there one at all? What is the audience doing with their hands? Which details carry the brand, and which are there only because they photograph well? And the one everybody skips: what do we want somebody to be able to retrieve once the room has been packed away and the crew have gone home?
Every detail has to earn its place. Pretty is lovely. Remembered is what the budget was actually for.
The difference was clear in an activation for Johnnie Walker Blue Label in Singapore. Whisky has never had the presence in bottle service culture that tequila, vodka and champagne enjoy, and Blue Label’s arrival into that world needed to be bold, culturally fluent and very difficult to ignore. Rather than a conventional bottle presentation, the arrival itself became the story. A bespoke couture carriage carried the bottle through Marquee Singapore, led by a contemporary Striding Woman reimagining the brand’s Striding Man, with a crew extending the visual world around her.
The point was never simply that it looked spectacular. The procession built anticipation before the bottle ever reached the table; it created a clear peak at the reveal, and it interrupted a ritual everybody in that room had seen a hundred times, giving them a reason to turn around, watch, film and talk. The liquid had not changed at all. The memory around buying it had.
People will forget the tasting notes. They are considerably less likely to forget the night a couture carriage came across a nightclub towards them.
Then there’s AI, which is quietly changing the economics of all of this. Not by replacing live experience, which I think is the least interesting question in the room, but by collapsing the cost of producing beautiful things. It can generate extraordinary imagery, personalised creative, endless variations and entire visual worlds in an afternoon. At a time when luxury is rediscovering the value of the human hand, beautiful is about to get very cheap, and memorable is not.
AI can personalise an invitation, adapt the room around a guest, guide somebody through it and keep the conversation going for weeks afterwards. It is already changing how luxury consumers discover brands. What it cannot do is go back and put meaning into a moment that never had any.
This is probably the hardest part for us to swallow, because our industry has become extremely good at building rooms that look extraordinary on a screen for two days and leave almost no accessible trace of the brand a month later. Meanwhile, a smaller, more emotionally coherent experience keeps returning to somebody’s mind long after the set has been struck. One of those is an expensive photograph. The other is still working weeks later, at the exact moment somebody finally decides where their money is going.
According to PQ Media, global experiential marketing spending reached nearly US$139 billion in 2025, which is a remarkable amount of money to spend on moments. The uncomfortable question is how much of that is buying memory and how much is buying an impression that has already faded. Thirteen years in, memory still strikes me as slightly miraculous. One tiny moment will sit in your head for decades while an entire evening disappears before breakfast.
Brands face roughly the same choice the rest of us face at a party. You can stand at the edge looking immaculate and guarding the handbags, or you can get properly involved and risk the squirty cream. Only one of those gets talked about at brunch.
Kristy Castleton is the Founder of Rebel & Soul, The Memory Makers, an experiential agency that uses a neuroscience twist to design brand experiences engineered to be remembered.
