July, 2026.- Many agencies claim “brand” and “experience” as their superpower. Very few can actually do both. Fewer still can show you the plumbing of how to build a brand-led experience. Alana Eversole, Global EVP, Experience at Landor, has returned to the agency after time away, and she sees something unique: Landor does not just write a brand promise on a page and walk away. It builds the literal muscle to translate that promise into lived experience—connecting what a brand believes to how it behaves across physical, digital, and sensory worlds.
In this interview, Eversole discusses what it means for physical retail when an AI agent may be making the purchase decision, not the human in the space. In an agentic world, the utility of transaction-based retail is dead. Purchase decisions based purely on price or convenience will be instantly handled by an AI agent. Humans will not even need to enter the store. But who programs the agent? The human does. Brands need to influence “agentic choice” by winning the battle for human conviction. The only way to survive is to build such an intense, visceral emotional connection with the human that they actively instruct their AI: “Buy me this brand, and only this brand.” This means shifting physical retail from “Point of Sale” to “Point of Experience.”
Ryan Frost, Global Executive Creative Director, has spent nearly two decades at Landor across London, Singapore, and New York. What has kept him at one agency for so long is not loyalty—the sign stayed the same, but everything behind the door always changed. Two decades of working on cereal and surgery, airlines and software. That is not one job for twenty years. It is twenty jobs that happened to share a point of view on brand.
Frost also addresses the gap he sees in young creative talent: nerve. Young creatives make beautiful things, fast. What they have had less practice at is believing in one idea hard enough to defend it in a room that does not want to hear it. A tool will hand you a hundred options. It will never tell you which one is worth your name. That choice is the job. Conviction is not.
Alana Eversole (Global EVP, Experience):
1. The Boomerang Return: You’re rejoining Landor after some time experiencing the brand landscape from the outside. What did you learn outside Landor that you’re now bringing back, and what do you see differently after being away?
Alana Eversole: Spending time working beyond Landor gave me a valuable perspective and a reinforced conviction that brand must be the organizing principle of experience. Many agencies claim ‘brand’ and ‘experience’ as their superpower, but very few can actually do both, and fewer still can show you the plumbing of how to build a brand-led experience. The industry is full of talented people and brilliant agencies doing exceptional work. Returning to Landor, I’m struck by how we very deliberately connect brand strategy to lived experience. In fact, experience is probably the most powerful expression of brand.
Over the last five or six years, Landor has done something incredibly unique: we’ve systematically integrated experience design, spatial design, service, and digital product capability and under a brand-led umbrella, bringing together experience specialism from Landor, what was formerly Fitch, plus DeepLocal and bdg, to name just a few of the specialists within our dynamic collective.
Coming back, I see our Brand Driver Platform (the foundation of our brand positioning work) not just as a tool, but as a point of difference. We don’t just write a brand promise on a page and walk away. We build the literal muscle to translate that promise into lived experience—connecting what a brand believes to how it behaves across physical, digital, and sensory worlds. Being away made me realize just how rare and valuable that connected chain that Landor can activate is. The result is experiences that are effective and lasting investments for our client’s brands.
2. Experience in an Agentic World: Jane Geraghty said experiences help “influence agentic choice.” What does that mean for a physical retail environment when an AI agent may be making the purchase decision, not the human in the space?
Alana Eversole: Yes, I think Jane is right and it means that the entire purpose of physical retail is going to change. If we’re honest, most retail environments are still designed around transaction – getting someone to pick up a box, walk to a register, and hand over a credit card. In an agentic world, that utility is dead. Purchase decisions based purely on price or convenience will be instantly handled by an AI agent. Humans won’t even need to enter the store.
But here’s the thing: who programs the agent? The human does. Brands need to influence “agentic choice” by winning the battle for human conviction. The algorithm executes the purchase, but the human should determine their preference. The only way to survive in an agentic world is to build such an intense, visceral emotional connection with the human that they actively instruct their AI: ‘Buy me this brand, and only this brand.’ This is where product experiences, physical retail and sensory environments become more important, not less, and I think it means we’re going to shift physical retail from “Point of Sale” to a “Point of Experience.” The store is no longer where you go to buy the brand; it’s where you go to feel what the brand believes.
3. Digital channels excel at convenience, but physical spaces excel at connection. How do you use multi-sensory environmental design (lighting, soundscapes, tactility) to create a ‘dwell-state’ where consumers voluntarily put their screens away?
Alana Eversole: To get someone to put their phone in their pocket, you have to offer them something that a glass screen can’t replicate because you can’t out-screen a screen.
Our approach is heavily rooted in what we call the “Peaks of Experience,” which is built on Kahneman’s Peak-End Rule. What we’ve learned is that putting the same amount of investment behind every single touchpoint is a waste of money. Humans don’t remember experiences as a continuous flow; we remember them as weighted snapshots of the most intense moment (the peak) and the final impression (the end).
So, we don’t try to make every second of a retail visit mind-blowing. Instead, we find the emotionally charged moments and use things like multi-sensorial design to slow them down and enjoy something their phone can’t give them, and in doing so we build and reinforce brand recognition and emotional connection.
Lego is a great example of a brand achieving this dwell-state. The minute you step into a Lego environment, the rules change. It interrupts autopilot. It replaces passive scrolling with active participation. The scale, tactility, geometry, and hands-on nature of the experience demand a different kind of attention—one that a screen simply can’t deliver. That’s the opportunity for physical environments: not to compete with digital on convenience, but to do what digital cannot—create presence, memory, and emotional conviction.
4. In senior experience design, we often see a tug-of-war between brand vision, CX desires, and operational realities. How do you design physical environments that seamlessly integrate brand storytelling and CX, while respecting operational constraints?
Alana Eversole: In most organizations marketing isn’t talking to customer experience, and customer experience isn’t integrated with operations. The challenge is real, but the reality is that physical environments are the only place where all three of those forces simultaneously collide.
We’ve talked about our belief that emotion is the link between brand and experience, but when we think about linking experience to operations, we have brilliant specialists who build cross-functional service blueprints to unify brand experience and operational constraints. The blueprint maps what the customer experiences frontstage and what associates, technology, and backend logistics must do backstage to deliver it. We do this early on, and we bring all the right people, not just brand or marketing leaders, around the table right from day one. We’ve learned to allow operational constraints to actively shape our design, rather than breaking it later. That’s been a real unlock for our experience teams.
5. The ROI of Sensory Branding: Physical and sensory experiences are expensive to build. How do you measure the ROI of a spatial design or immersive environment when the consumer may not convert for weeks or months?
Alana Eversole: Well, if you ask me, for too long, agencies have asked clients to invest in physical design based on pure faith. One of the advantages of partnering with Landor is our specialist Experience Performance practice, which actually quantifies what brand-led experiences are worth, helping clients validate the investment internally and make bolder decisions with less nerves and risk.
We don’t guess. We’re able to use brand, audience, and commercial data to model opportunity before we start designing. We can test concepts before scale. And we can build credible investment cases predicting uplift across key metrics to give leadership the evidence they need to make bolder choices with certainty. I don’t know of any other agency that can quantify, monetize, and predict the value of experience and you see it in the results of our work.
Ryan Frost (Global Executive Creative Director):
6. Almost 20 Years at Landor: You’ve spent nearly two decades at Landor across London, Singapore, and New York. What has kept you at one agency for so long, and how do you stay creatively hungry when you know the hallways so well?
Ryan Frost: People assume its loyalty, but loyalty is the wrong word. I never stayed at the same agency. The sign stayed the same (for the best part). Everything behind the door always changed and that’s what’s kept me hooked.
In two decades, I have worked on cereal and surgery, airlines and software, coffee and optometry. A different group of strangers in every brief. That is not one job for twenty years. It is twenty jobs that happened to share a POV on brand.
Hunger is not about novelty. It is about respect for the problem. Knowing the hallways tells you where the coffee is. It tells you nothing about the answer.
I attempt to make furniture during my weekends. A year at a bench and I still get a joint wrong (damn dovetails). The day you believe you have craft mastered is the day you stop being any good at it. I want to keep getting the joint wrong. That is the whole point.
In my time at Landor, the agency has kept evolving and moving forward with pace. New capabilities, new specialisms, new ways of solving the problem. And always, a refusal to settle for the expected. That restlessness is contagious. It’s hard not to stay inspired and invested when the place keeps raising the stakes.
7. From ECD Americas to Global ECD: You’re being promoted to a newly created global role alongside three other Global ECDs. How does creative leadership work when four people share a title? Who has the final call on a major client pitch?
Ryan Frost: Four people, one title, and it works because it was never built to be a pyramid.
Most agencies run creative like a relay. One person carries the baton, everyone else watches. We don’t. Four Global ECDs means four ways of seeing. A healthcare brand and a sportswear brand should not get the same brain. At Landor they don’t have to, we have a team of incredible humans with unparalleled collective experience, underscored with a shared point of view that brand matters more than it ever has.
The final call on a pitch isn’t a seat. It’s a fit. Whoever is closest to the client and the idea leads it. The rest of us serve it. The day we start arguing about who holds the pencil is the day we have already lost the pitch.
Teemu Suviala, our Global Chief Creative Officer, sets the altitude. We fly the planes.
8. Technology’s Impact on Brand Experience: Technology is reshaping how brands are discovered and experienced. What’s one technological development that excites you most for brand design, and one that you fear is making brands less distinctive?
Ryan Frost: What excites me about AI developments is speed of thought made visible. An idea used to take weeks to become something you could feel. Now it takes an afternoon. I can show a client the brand alive and in motion before we’ve spent $ building it. The conversation stops being “do you like this logo?” and becomes “does this feel like you?”, “does it feel like who you could be?” That is a far better question, and we get to it far sooner.
That is the gift. Here is the cost.
The same machine that lets everyone move fast gives everyone the same taste. Feed a thousand brands through one model and you get a thousand cousins. The tool has a default, and the default is the safe middle of everything it has ever seen. Lovely. Competent. Forgettable.
So, the thing that excites me and the thing that worries me are the same thing. It depends entirely on who is holding it. The default setting of every tool is average, and average is the one thing a brand cannot afford to be.
And as execution gets easier, the gap between brands that stand for something and brands that simply exist gets wider. A brand with one clear point of view, scaled coherently across everything it touches, becomes the exception. Right now, that exception is easier to spot than ever, because everything around it is starting to look the same.
What lifts work above that default is human taste and judgement. One person’s judgement about what is good and what is not. Taste is not a committee. It is not a data set. It is not the option most people clicked. It is a single human being saying, quietly and certainly, that one is better. And being willing to be wrong about it.
That judgement is the job now. The machine will hand you a thousand answers. Taste is the thing that tells you which one is true.
So whatever else changes, we protect the idea. At all costs. The idea is the one thing the tools cannot hand us, cannot fake, and cannot replace. Everything else is just delivery. Guard the making and you have guarded nothing. Guard the idea and you have guarded the only thing worth having.
9. Mentoring Global Creative Talent: You’re tasked with attracting and mentoring senior creative talent worldwide. What’s the single biggest gap you see in young creative talent today that you’re determined to fix?
Ryan Frost: The gap is nerve.
Young creatives make beautiful things, fast, faster than I ever could. What they have had less practice at is believing in one idea hard enough to defend it in a room that does not want to hear it.
A tool will hand you a hundred options. It will never tell you which one is worth your name. That choice is the job. An idea nobody will stand behind is just an option, and options are cheap now. Conviction isn’t.
Maya Angelou said, “People will never forget how you made them feel”. A model cannot feel anything, so it cannot do that part for you. Someone has to care whether it is right.
So that is what I am here to protect. Not their skill. Their nerve.
10. Human Imagination + New Tools: You said the opportunity is to combine “human imagination, strategic thinking and new tools.” What tool available today is most underutilized by brand designers, and what tool is overhyped?
Ryan Frost: Most underutilised? The conversation. Designers reach for the screen before they reach for the question. Twenty minutes with a real person beats twenty hours of mood boards. Watching someone use/ponder/push the thing you made is the most honest feedback in the world, and almost nobody books the time for it.
Most overhyped? The prompt. There is a belief that typing the perfect sentence into a model is the creative act. It isn’t. That is ordering off a menu. And the menu is the same one everybody else is reading.
The best tool in the building has not changed in a hundred years. It is a person who has sat with a problem long enough to feel something true about it, and the nerve to make you feel it too. Everything else is just a faster way to deliver that. Or a faster way to avoid it.
