Wawa & the Kindness Effect- A Real-World Model of Experience Manufacturing™
How one brand turns three minutes into lasting brand affinity—and models what happens when every interaction is intentionally crafted.
What if a brand could make people kinder?
Not just toward the employees behind the counter—but toward each other.
What if walking into a convenience store could shift your default setting? Make you more likely to hold a door. To smile at a stranger. Wait a little longer—without thinking twice. Not because someone told you to—but because the space itself inspires it.
That’s exactly what Wawa has done.
Across decades of operational consistency and cultural reinforcement, Wawa has manufactured more than loyalty—it has engineered prosocial behavior. In the Delaware Valley, it’s a running truth:
You hold the door at Wawa. Even if someone is twenty feet behind you. Especially then.
It’s not just habit.
It’s emotional conditioning at scale.
My daughter says it best, “People are just nicer at Wawa!”
The Hypothesis: Kindness, Manufactured
Through repetition and reliability, Wawa has transferred its internal values—politeness, generosity, and warmth—into its customer base. It hasn’t done this through slogans or signage. It has done it through predictable emotional experiences.
At Wawa, everyone knows the rhythm.
The greeting. The coffee queue. The way strangers nod, gesture, smile.
It’s invisible to most. But if you grew up with a Wawa in your community, you know exactly what is being described. You’ve experienced the benefit of it. And most importantly, you’ve passed it on. This can be stated with so much certainty because it’s a fact.
In other public spaces—airports, big-box stores, fast food lines—those social niceties fall apart. At Wawa, they hold. That consistency isn’t accidental. It was built through decades of consistency.
And it reveals something much deeper about the role of brands in modern life:
The best brands don’t just shape transactions. They shape us.
Experience as Social Infrastructure
The term “customer experience” is often limited to support interactions or in-app journeys. But Wawa shows us something broader: experience as cultural infrastructure.
Wawa CEO Chris Gheysens explains:
“We strive to make it the best three to five minutes of someone’s day.”
That’s not a tagline or a vision—it’s a blueprint for the experience Wawa manufactures. Every store layout, every employee interaction, every touchpoint is optimized for that short window of time. Not just to move product, but to shift how someone feels, making deposits in customers’ emotional bank accounts.
“We want people who walk into Wawa to have a sense of calm, a sense of comfort.” Gheysens explained.
And once inside, customers mirror what they receive—because consistency breeds confidence and trust, and in turn breeds generosity.
This approach reflects The More Effect—the idea that every interaction is a moment to make someone else’s experience more meaningful, more human, more generous. It asks a simple but profound question: What do we want the customer to feel, to be deposited in their brand memory, when they walk away?
This is Experience Manufacturing™:
The intentional, repeatable design of customer interactions that build emotional equity and lasting brand affinity. It turns every moment into a deposit of trust—and transforms brands and create (read: manufacture) experiences that produce emotional and social outcomes.
At Wawa, the outcome is a kind of community-in-motion. A rotating cast of strangers who behave like friends and neighbors.
Why It Works
It starts with the brand’s DNA:
- Stores that feel familiar, whether in Fishtown or Florida.
- Employees trained not just for speed, but for warmth.
- A pace of service that’s efficient but not rushed.
- Moments of delight—handwritten notes on coffee sleeves, friendly greetings, unspoken courtesies—that reinforce a shared standard.
And it extends to how Wawa develops its people. Over 90% of store leaders are promoted from within. 40% of the company is employee-owned. And in an industry known for burnout and churn, Wawa has a building dedicated to one thing: “Servant-leader training.”
That leadership philosophy, grounded in the Quaker legacy of the founding Wood family, trickles down into the smallest gestures. It’s why even a fifth-grader’s hand-drawn note on a coffee sleeve can feel like part of the brand story.
These experiences aren’t grand gestures.
They’re daily, small deposits into what I call the customer’s emotional bank account.
And over time, those deposits compound.
Not just into brand loyalty—but into human behavior.
The Door-Hold Test
Here’s the litmus test.
Picture yourself walking into a Wawa. You open the door. Someone’s coming, maybe twenty feet behind you. You pause. You hold it. You wait. You’re not even sure why you’re doing it at first.
It’s not out of obligation. Or out of expectation. You do it, because that’s what Wawa customers do for each other. It is kindness elevated.
So when you are one, you do it too.
Now picture that same moment in almost any other national chain. Do you stop? Maybe. But not instinctively because of the retail location you are in. And definitely not with the same certainty.
That difference?
That’s the result of experience manufacturing. The intentional, deliberate creation of a shared brand experience passing on the values the brand stands for.
The Bigger Question
If Wawa can create a space where people behave better—without being asked, rewarded, or reminded—what could your brand create?
Could you manufacture calm in chaos?
Could you design loyalty not by what you say, but how you make your customers feel? The values your brand manufactures to pass on to them. That’s the future. Emotional resonance at scale.
Looking Ahead
In the coming weeks, I’ll be releasing a white paper that introduces Experience Manufacturing™—a new strategic framework for building emotional equity, trust, and behavioral influence through consistent, human-centered design. (Followed by a book later this year, The Experience Manufacturer)
What Wawa has built is not a marketing story.
It’s a blueprint.
One that shows us what’s possible when a brand becomes more than a service.
When it becomes a signal. A standard. A social operating system.
Wawa hasn’t just taught people how to order hoagies.
It has quietly taught them how to treat each other.
What’s your brand teaching your customers—without saying a word?
Source:
Rubenstein, Mike. “Wawa Feels America’s Uncertainty and Offers ‘Sense of Comfort’ as Customers Spend Less.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 20, 2024.
About the Author:
Jeremy Victor is the Chief Customer Officer at Noom and creator of The More Effect—a leadership framework for unlocking human potential in the age of AI. He writes and (soon) hosts the Business @ the Speed of AI newsletter and podcast, exploring the intersection of emotion, technology, and modern leadership. With 30 years leading digital transformation, Jeremy blends boardroom strategy with sideline wisdom from coaching youth athletes to reimagine the future of work and life.
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