Why short-termism erodes relationships, in learning, business and marketing
I want to give you a dilemma. If you were at university and I gave you a tool that could write your entire essay for you in ten seconds, and you got the mark you wanted, would you use it?
Most people say yes almost instinctively. Then the moral guilt kicks in, and they settle on “yes, if no one finds out”.
But here’s the catch nobody considers at first. You get the mark in a ruthlessly efficient way, but you don’t get the thing the essay was actually for. Every year in the UK alone millions of essays are written, and I’d hazard a guess that well over 95% never see the light of day again after marking. The value was never the document. It was working through it. The understanding you build, and the knowledge you commit to memory for later.
So in the AI learning shortcut you hack the educational system but simultaneously cheat the cognitive one. You might pick up a light understanding from proofreading, but you’ve optimised for the artefact and skipped the real asset.
Like every Instagram influencers’ sunset will tell you, it’s all about the journey, not the destination. A cliche, but here it’s on the money.
I refer to it as cognitive hyperbolic discounting. Our habit of choosing an immediate reward over a larger reward that arrives later. The brain heavily discounts the future, so the essay in ten seconds beats the understanding that takes ten weeks, even though the understanding is worth far more.
Which friction are you removing
For me this is where the AI conversation gets interesting, because not all shortcuts are equal. AI is brilliant at removing friction, and we love keeping things simple. The critical question is which friction you are removing.
When I think back to my university days (yes, a long time ago!) and then where I would use AI now, there’s a clear line. There’s real value in using it to remove what I’d call “retrieval friction” (the admin of finding information). Until recently that was a job for Google, and Google was itself an evolution of scouring the library shelves for the right book. So really an LLM is just the next step in that same march towards efficiency.
I’d probably happily use AI to help structure my notes, or as the critical friend I talk my thinking through with. In those cases it feels like a genuine long-term win, because you’ve freed up time for the deep work where the value actually sits.
But if you use it to remove “understanding friction” (getting it to read the book and hand you the takeaways, or worse, write the essay) then you’re back to the artefact without the learning. On paper you look like you understand something. You almost certainly don’t. Because understanding is built through repeated, effortful engagement over time. Think back to any tricky assignment you fought your way through. By the end you understood the subject properly. There is no shortcut into that deeper layer.
One of my favourite podcasters, Chris Williamson, helps to highlight the core issue well, when he explains the difference between observable and hidden metrics in life:
“An observable metric would be something like the amount of money you earn per year, the value of the car you drive, or the engine size of the car you drive, or the value of your house. A hidden metric would be something like the quality of your relationship with your partner, the amount of time you get to spend without tasks to do, the length of your commute.”
Chris Williamson, The Joe Rogan Experience Episode #21041
This shows how the observable number is easy to chase, but the hidden one is where the real quality of life sits. However in life we optimise for the observable and let the hidden slide.
Not just a personal issue
When it comes to business it’s a different arena, but the same instinct. We take the return we can see today and trade off the bigger one we could have earned by waiting.
It’s the exact trade a business makes when it chases this quarter’s number at the expense of next year’s position, or the long-term health of its customer relationships. One is immediately quantifiable. But that doesn’t make it the better decision over time.
This is an easier needle to thread for smaller businesses, because they usually carry fewer external pressures. (The caveat is that every business needs to stay financially liquid to have the privilege of a long term at all.) And once you look at publicly listed companies, the incentives, and pressures, change.
Of course there’s nuance depending on where a business sits in its lifecycle. Think of the losses many tech start-ups sustain for years on the promise of long-term brilliance. But in most cases public markets reward quarterly delivery. That’s a structural challenge for us to navigate, and it creates enormous pressure to make this quarter look good even when it costs you next year.
When you’re in this position, to be able to push back against that pressure you need examples that build confidence in the longer horizon. Where better to start than Amazon?
Amazon lost money for years and reinvested almost everything into infrastructure, logistics and, crucially, the customer relationship, rather than showing a quarterly profit. I like Bezos’s own line on it:
“When somebody congratulates Amazon on a good quarter, I say thank you. But what I’m thinking is that those quarterly results were actually pretty much fully baked about three years ago.”
Jeff Bezos
That’s someone thinking in relationship time, not transaction time. And the sharpest expression of it is Prime. Amazon didn’t just build warehouses, it built a subscription relationship that compounds loyalty year after year, the sort of thing that only pays off if you’re patient.
AWS is another internal proof point. Amazon poured money into it for years before it became the profit engine it is now, because infrastructure economics are brutal upfront and close to free at the margin once built. Today AWS delivered $45.6 billion in annual operating income, up from $39.8 billion the year before, and equates to nearly 57% of the groups operating profit.
Tesla is the other obvious one. Years of losses through the 2010s while it built manufacturing capability that took a long time to pay back, then a first full year of profit of around $721 million as it moved into the 2020s, on its way to becoming one of the largest carmakers in the world.
The challenge for blue-chip firms is that they’re under permanent public scrutiny, so every bet is visible and punishable in real time. You can’t really blame a chief executive or finance director for pushing hard to hit the quarter, especially when much of the C-suite’s pay (and often their job security) is tied to consistently delivering shareholder value.
This is where private and family businesses have a genuine structural advantage. Without quarterly public reporting to answer to, they can run a longer investment horizon by design.
Marketing, and the long tail we keep cutting
So when we turn this thinking to marketing, customer experience and relationships, it should hopefully open up a real debate about where we put our energy.
In recent years there’s been so much effort and noise around optimising the channels that deliver immediate conversion. Budgets keep tilting that way, because you can see and prove the impact today, this quarter. It’s probably why so many frameworks and funnels stop at the point of first conversion. It’s easier to track, and it’s where a lot of marketing minds are drawn.
But a longer view means some of those models need adapting to tell the whole story. That’s why we work with an adapted version of a well-known model, AIDA.
First set out by the American advertising pioneer Elias St. Elmo Lewis in 1898, AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. Our broader variant, AIDALA, adds Loyalty and Advocacy. They’re the long tail. They compound, and they’re exactly what gets sacrificed under short-term pressure. Building them into the model guards against a business chasing acquisition metrics at the expense of loyalty and advocacy, the commercial twin of hyperbolic discounting.
WHAT HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS TEACH US
So how do we design experiences and communications that build long-term relationships, foster loyalty and earn advocacy? It helps to look at the science of how human relationships actually form, because behind every business or brand you’re trying to connect with, there’s a person on the other side. The psychology underneath is more human, and less commercial, than we tend to assume.
Too often, people in business talk about “building relationships” as a vague, fluffy idea parked in the marketing department. But there are several solid studies on interpersonal relationships we can lean on.
Social Penetration Theory 2 is the one I quote most, because it translates so cleanly into business and the onion analogy is instantly visual. Admit it, you’re now thinking of an onion. Altman and Taylor modelled relationships as an onion, layers running from shallow and broad on the outside to narrow and deep at the core. Relationships deepen through gradual, reciprocal self-disclosure, and you cannot skip layers. Go straight for the deep, personal stuff too early and it doesn’t read as intimacy, it reads as a violation.
The Investment Model3, from Caryl Rusbult, says commitment isn’t driven mainly by satisfaction. It’s driven by satisfaction, the quality of your alternatives, and the size of your investment, specifically the things you can’t get back if it ends. She explains that investment you can’t reclaim is what signals real commitment, because it’s expensive to fake.
Costly Signalling4, rooted in evolutionary psychology, says a signal is only informative if it’s costly to produce. A discount code is a cheap signal, anyone can send one. A brand that remembers your history and shows up consistently for years is an expensive signal, and rare precisely because it’s hard to fake. Patagonia is the clearest example I know: free repairs, its Worn Wear programme, even a “Don’t Buy This Jacket” campaign. All expensive, all signals that the relationship matters more than the next sale.
And Mere Exposure5, best known from Robert Zajonc’s work in the 1960s, says familiarity breeds preference through repeated, low-stakes contact. The mechanism needs both parts: repeated and low stakes. Frequency without depth is just noise.
Weave those together and relationships are a compounding mechanism, built in layers, through reciprocal and costly signals, over repeated low-stakes contact. Every shortcut either skips a layer, fakes a signal, or turns low-stakes contact into high-pressure contact, and the other side can always feel it.
Plenty of businesses claim to be invested in relationships. But very few operate at this level of attention and care. That gap is where a genuine competitive advantage is waiting.
The shortcut brands take most often
Look at the most common shortcut of all, asking for the deep layer too early. A good place to start is to map what you’re asking a customer for against how deep (established) into the relationship you actually are. Early on, shallow asks are appropriate, such as a first name, or an email address in exchange for something useful. Low stakes, lightweight, reciprocal, because you gave first and didn’t ask for much.
The mistake brands make constantly is reaching for the deep layer straight away. Detailed personal data, financial information, invasive personalisation, before any of the shallow, gradual, reciprocal work has happened. Even when the ask is perfectly reasonable in isolation, it lands as intrusive, because the relationship hasn’t earned it yet. It’s all about timing and the maturity of relationship.
However, some do it well. Spotify asks for almost nothing up front and learns your taste from what you actually play, then hands it back once a year as Wrapped, a gift rather than a tax. Duolingo lets you start learning immediately and only asks you to create an account once you’ve had a win. The ask arrives after you’ve experienced some of the value, not before.
But sadly plenty do it badly. The classic is the gated whitepaper, asking for name, email, company, job title, phone number, all demanded before you’ve read a word. Yes, email feels a light ask, but telephone number is a hard no. Or the retailer that forces you to create an account just to check out, when a guest checkout would do. The ask itself might be fair, but the timing violates the layer (stage of the relationship) you’re actually on.
This anchors us back to Customer Experience Principle 7: Learn and Build the Relationship Over Time. It’s the one people nod along to and then ignore, because it asks for the thing businesses find hardest, patience. You need to earn the right to the next layer before you reach for it. Pay attention, remember what you’re told, and let trust set at its own pace. When you do that the depth, and quality, arrives on its own. Rush it and you’re back to faking a signal the other side can instinctively smell a mile off.
Here’s the commonality I see. Relationships, whether it’s a friendship, a brand relationship, or your relationship with your own knowledge, are all built the same way. Layer by layer, through reciprocal and costly signals, over repeated contact. There is no shortcut into the deep layer that won’t cost you the very thing you were trying to build.
A THOUGHT FOR YOU
One question to take into your own business this week. Pick a metric you report on, and ask honestly: is this measuring the relationship, or is it measuring the transaction?
If it’s the second, that’s fine. Transactions matter. Just know that’s what you’re looking at, and don’t mistake it for the whole picture. And wherever you can, stretch the timeframe on your thinking, because that’s where you start to design and deliver the deeper relationships, that truly add value to everyone.
