December 17, 2025
Rethinking Endings: Why Your Off-Boarding is the Final Chapter of Your Brand Story
We can divide the consumer lifecycle into three distinct phases: onboarding, usage, and off-boarding.
At the beginning, businesses attract consumers through advertising and marketing, telling persuasive stories about the benefits of their product. That onboarding continues through packaging and first-use experiences that reaffirm purchase decisions and guide the consumer into early use. The usage phase delivers on those promises: fulfilling needs, reinforcing the brand story, and empowering customers to get things done and improve their lives.
But as time passes, confidence and familiarity wane. Usage slows, and inactivity begins. The off-boarding phase quietly starts. The consumer begins to detach, looking for ways to dispose of the product or close their account. At this stage, company engagement typically fades — and the customer often turns to third parties, like councils or municipal services, to complete the ending.
The end is happening, but the brand is no longer part of it. This is a missed opportunity.
Most businesses, once they sense a customer is slipping away, focus on pulling them back: upselling a new version, offering discounts, or pushing upgrades. Of course, it makes sense to retain customers, but when companies realise the relationship is truly ending, they often drop the ball entirely. The experience becomes fragmented, unhelpful, or simply absent.
That final interaction, the off-boarding experience, is a place to do meaningful work. Inspire memories, build reflection, protect brand equity.
The Strategic Value of a Good Ending
The way we think about endings needs to evolve. Businesses are missing a vital opportunity — not just to engage, but to inspire, to create closure, and to honour the relationship that’s coming to an end. An ending is the emotional conclusion of the brand story. It’s where meaning can be reinforced, not lost.
The evidence of this failure to manage the endgame is widespread. In our digital lives, IBM estimates that up to 90% of all data is “dark data”—unnecessary information we are unwilling to delete. In our homes, the average UK adult keeps 31 unworn items of clothing in their wardrobe for at least a year, creating inventory that has lost its original emotional meaning. This inertia is what we call The End Gap. A gap of meaning and emotion, where the customer walks alone to the end of the experience.
This oversight is not necessary. Endineering challenges this paradigm, transforming the end into a strategic asset through empathy and design.
Reverse Logistics as Relationship Building: Instead of letting products become anonymous waste, companies can design for seamless retrieval. Take the example of Rapanui Clothing, which encourages customers to return worn-out T-shirts for free. This actively bonds the consumer and provider in a shared purpose and grants the customer a reward for their participation. Avoiding that material to leak outside of the customer/producer relationship.
Data Deletion as a Trust Signal: Data deletion can move beyond cold functionality, becoming a moment to reaffirm trust and integrity. Companies that make it easy to leave, like Netflix, are proud of their “no-hassle online cancellation” policy. This transparent approach protects their final brand memory.
Addressing E-Waste Scale: When companies fail to address the off-boarding experience, they contribute to the problem at a staggering scale. For example, Apple’s 2024 sales of 231.8 million iPhones dwarf its collection of only 15.9 million devices for recycling, demonstrating how swiftly product identity is anonymised after purchase.
For decades, companies have crafted nuance, meaning, and emotion around the beginning and middle of their stories — but rarely the end. Yet it’s at the end of the story that all promises should come together. Too often, that’s where it all falls apart.
The Practitioner’s Takeaway: Designing the Good Goodbye
The question for every CX professional isn’t just, “How do we keep them?” but, “How does it end?” This is achieved by designing the process to acknowledge human emotions and clear practical routes.
Map the Emotional Off-Ramp: Acknowledge the inevitable point where the relationship breaks. Ensure the brand’s core values (e.g., integrity, simplicity, transparency) are fully reflected in the account closure, data deletion, or product return flows.
Measure the Final Memory: Recognise that the off-boarding experience constitutes the “end” in the Peak-End Rule of customer memory. Invest resources here to secure a final positive memory that protects future brand equity and leaves the door open for re-engagement.
Make the Ending Actionable: Design clear routes for action, empowering customers to fulfil the brand’s final ESG responsibility. This turns a moment of detachment into a partnership of final value.
The end comes to everything. Make sure it isn’t forgotten by your CX teams.
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Joe Macleod is the Founder and Head of Endineering at andEnd. He is the author of Ends & Endineering and a TEDx speaker, known for his work on designing meaningful endings within customer experiences. Macleod advises and mentors some of the world’s leading brands on how to create thoughtful, effective consumer off-boarding experiences.
