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If it feels like you’re running twice as fast only to stay in the same place with your business, you aren’t alone. The effort required to reach and retain a customer has never been higher, yet the results have never felt more fleeting.
With LLMs rapidly replacing search engines and media consumption fragmenting into a billion different shapes, the old "direct lines" to your audience are increasingly congested. For businesses, it’s a race for visibility in an environment where even the best content is easily ignored.
In this "distraction world," as Sheyna Bruckner, SVP at experiential agency Sparks, calls it, the win isn't simply about fighting for a second of attention today, it's about earning a place in a customer’s mind for tomorrow and creating real-world, human experiences. That requires, Bruckner continues, “an investment in something beyond the very short-term world we operate in right now.”
So how can brands build authentic connections that last?
To find out, WIRED joined forces with Sparks to bring some of the world’s leading voices in brand strategy, product innovation and design to Lisbon for The Connection Code, the first event in a series exploring how trust, authenticity and experience are reshaping brand engagement. Between them, those experts have developed products that have connected with millions of people across consumer goods, digital learning and enterprise software. By the end of a lively in-person debate, they had landed on three astute rules that can apply to almost any brand…
Rule 1: Don’t pitch the community–take part in it
When entering a new space—whether that’s expanding to a new territory or trying to tap into an emerging subculture—it’s vital that brands really understand it before they start selling. “To me it’s very simple,” says Erika Wykes-Sneyd, GM/VP at adidas. “You’ve got to be it, do it and then you can show it or say it. It first has to be part of who you are.”
Wykes-Sneyd launched the sportswear brand’s foray into gaming and virtual worlds in 2021. At a time when many companies were struggling to deliver results with these initiatives, adidas was a notable success story. It was one of the first real-world brands to bring virtual clothing to people’s digital avatars, and its NFTs collection generated around $22m in sales.
For adidas, which had spent decades patiently building real-world cachet, it was important that its digital offerings not be seen as a cash grab. That means trying to add value first—asking gamers what they want and taking part in the community before you try and sell anything. “Otherwise you’re just advertising,” says Wykes-Sneyd, “and your brand is going to lack soul, and people can see through that.”
Her team started by making connections with the metaverse’s “ground floor tastemakers”—the ones shaping opinions on Discord and Twitter (now X), and mapping the overlap between what they cared about and what adidas could credibly offer.
Although direct sales can result from initiatives like this, it is important that certain aspects prioritize cultural impact over immediate ROI. This principle is central to all of adidas’ virtual goods programs, including the ‘Into the Metaverse’ drop, the Metaverse Fashion Week activation with Decentraland, and a more recent virtual-world project, Three Stripes City - a free add-on to Minecraft that offers unique items and challenges. “These were not pushed as a sales moment,” Wykes-Sneyd says. “It’s really for the community to engage with each other, and then adidas is kind of in the background, and they’re going to make those associations with the brand as a result.”
“Even the best digital experiences need to be anchored in something people can feel,” says Trin Basra, executive creative director at Sparks, who has led large-scale physical experiences for brands including Workday and Twitch. “When people share space, energy and emotion, trust forms faster and lasts longer. That’s where connection stops being abstract and starts becoming real.”
Rule 2: Stop building for ‘users’ and start designing for ‘people’
For most businesses, your interface—whether it’s a booking page, a website, or a simple contact form—is the digital stand-in for a face-to-face conversation. But when we treat these touchpoints as mere functional utilities, we often create digital experiences that feel cold, mechanical, and transactional. We end up building for a logical robot that just wants to complete a task, rather than a human with emotions, doubts, and a need for trust. Solving for that can be the difference between a one-off visit and a genuine connection.
At Metalab, a design agency that has helped companies like Slack, Nike and Google develop some of the world’s most widely-used digital products, Chief Design Officer Sara Vienna is preoccupied with the person behind the click. “In order to design a great user experience you have got to understand who’s on the other side of the screen,” she says. That means talking with people who use or may use your product and looking for patterns in what they need. You also need to observe usage, not just taking what they say at face value.
When working with Onton—an AI-powered visual search platform for interior design items—Metalab noticed that while users were impressed with the platform’s ability to respond to queries, they found it hard to trust the platform without seeing its reasoning. Prototype testing and usability sessions revealed a key insight: “Users trust AI results more when they can see evidence of effort and process”. So the Metalab team reshaped the design of the user interface—giving users information about what the AI was actually doing behind the scenes at each stage, thus making Onton’s final recommendations feel more grounded and reliable. “It’s about finding those simple human truths,” says Vienna—and that’s a principle that’s important everywhere, as brands work to make technology feel human and trustworthy in the real world too.
Rule 3: Prioritise outcomes over engagement
We’ve been taught that the ultimate metric is attention: the more time someone spends with your brand, the better. App designers have mastered this. They use design techniques borrowed from neuroscience and behavioural psychology to make their products ‘sticky’ and add mechanics like ‘streaks’ and ‘badges’ to give us little dopamine surges every time we log in. But there is a difference between a customer who is distracted by your product and one who is empowered by it.
“Connection is all about personalisation,” says Ilya Lukach, general manager at Headway Inc, which develops digital lifelong learning products that have reached hundreds of millions of users all over the world. Its flagship product, Headway, gives readers key insights from non-fiction books, while Impulse offers brain-training, and Nibble provides interactive lessons on topics ranging from art history to personal finance. The company’s north star for connecting with its customers is delivering "aha moments". This is the point where the user actually achieves what they set out to do—and understands where the product actually fits into the reality of their life.
To reach that point, Headway Inc treats data as a tool for empathy rather than just a way to track behavior. Because learning is a “high-friction activity,” they use hundreds of A/B tests to tease out the hidden patterns in how different cohorts of users behave. They found "eager learners" who jump into difficult material, while others only study during their lunch break or on their commute. For this latter group, Headway Inc has designed shorter interactive courses through Nibble that fit into 15-or 20-minute windows—a data-driven intervention aimed at making learning a habit, even if users spend less time per session. This approach is not limited to one product; it informs the design of all Headway Inc apps, and continues to guide the integration of new formats across the company
“That sort of approach gives you a more durable connection than a ‘badge’ ever could.”
The Connection Code is a series of conversations co-created by WIRED and Sparks, exploring how brands can move beyond surface-level engagement to design connection that lasts—across digital products, physical experiences and everything in between.
