When Competition Meets Experience Insight: What Dr. Luke Wainscoat’s Move to The Brattle Group Means for CX and Market Integrity
In an era when customer trust hinges as much on fairness as on service quality, a new kind of expertise is shaping the experience economy — one that blends economics, regulation, and competition law with human-centric strategy.
The Brattle Group’s recent announcement welcoming Dr. Luke Wainscoat as Principal in its Antitrust and Competition practice in Sydney isn’t just a business or legal headline. It’s a significant moment for organizations navigating a fast-evolving intersection: how competition policy impacts customer and employee experience.
Let’s unpack what this move signals — not just for regulatory economics but for the broader CX and EX landscape that increasingly relies on transparency, accountability, and trust in marketplaces.
The Customer Experience Behind Market Competition
Few CX leaders pause to consider how antitrust rulings, merger regimes, or pricing regulations influence customer outcomes. Yet the logic is simple: fair markets foster trust, and trust fuels loyalty. When digital platforms or dominant players exploit their market position, the first casualty isn’t always the competitor — it’s the customer experience.
Dr. Wainscoat’s portfolio, which includes work on cases such as Apple v. Epic, highlights the balancing act modern economies face: innovation should flourish, but not at the cost of customer choice. In that high-profile dispute, the core question was not only legal — it was experiential. Could customers exercise freedom of choice across digital ecosystems, or were they locked into narrow channels defined by gatekeepers?
His work underscores a profound truth for CX strategists: competition economics and experience design are becoming inseparable disciplines.
CX Lessons from the Antitrust Frontier
As organizations grow, CX professionals often focus on personalization, satisfaction scores, and digital transformation metrics. Yet, beneath the surface, regulatory decisions and antitrust principles dictate how freely those experiences can evolve.
Several core CX lessons emerge from Dr. Wainscoat’s career trajectory:
- Transparency is foundational trust. Whether in banking, telecom, or digital marketplaces, transparent pricing and open access boost long-term loyalty.
- Healthy competition fuels innovation. When industries invite newcomers, customer choice expands — forcing incumbents to improve service quality and ethical standards.
- CX and economics share feedback loops. A competitive market naturally rewards brands that understand consumer behavior, while monopolistic systems often dull responsiveness and creativity.
As Brattle strengthens its Asia-Pacific capabilities under Wainscoat’s leadership, these dynamics take center stage for both regulators and experience professionals.
Elevating Competition Policy into CX Strategy
For customer experience leaders, competition policy may seem remote — a matter of lawyers and economists. Yet recent trends suggest otherwise. From Australia’s new merger regime to global scrutiny of digital marketplaces, executive teams are being asked to demonstrate that their market strategies align with consumer benefit.
Let’s consider three areas where competition policy directly shapes CX outcomes:
1. Digital Platforms and Gatekeeper Conduct
When large ecosystems like app stores or marketplaces impose restrictive terms on sellers, the ripple effect is felt by customers through increased costs or reduced options. Regulatory economists like Dr. Wainscoat analyze these effects quantitatively — but CX leaders must translate them into qualitative insight: “What does this mean for fairness and trust in our brand?”
2. Pricing Structures and Perceived Fairness
A consumer’s perception of fairness directly shapes satisfaction. If a platform is seen as overcharging or price-discriminating under opaque algorithms, loyalty erodes. Competition specialists provide the frameworks to assess such risks before they damage brand credibility.
3. Mergers and Market Consolidation
The biggest CX challenge in mergers often comes after the transaction, when overlapping systems, cultures, and promises collide. By integrating competition modeling into merger planning, organizations can anticipate not just regulatory scrutiny but experience friction — how customers interpret and emotionally react to change.
Why Competition Expertise Now Belongs on CX Boards
Dr. Wainscoat’s joining The Brattle Group highlights a larger global shift: CX strategy teams need economists at the table. The reason is clear — customer experience excellence increasingly depends on ethical, equitable market participation.
Torben Voetmann, President and Principal at Brattle, captured this precisely: “Luke’s extensive experience across Australia and New Zealand enhances our regional capabilities… and strengthens our support for clients globally.”
In modern customer ecosystems, this “support” now extends beyond analytical rigor into organizational empathy — understanding how market-level fairness translates into customer-level well-being.
Forward-looking CX teams are adopting what might be called “experience economics” — integrating data from pricing models, competition analysis, and behavioral economics to craft strategies that benefit both customers and shareholders.
Case Study: The Trust Dividend in Regulated Markets
Consider Australia’s energy and utilities sectors, both mentioned among Dr. Wainscoat’s advisory areas. Historically, these industries faced some of the lowest customer satisfaction scores due to perceived unfairness in billing and opaque rate structures.
Yet, when competition policies encouraged transparent switching and standardized comparison tools, satisfaction improved significantly. Consumers not only felt greater control but also recognized value alignment between corporate actions and public interest.
That shift wasn’t driven by marketing — it was driven by regulatory clarity and economic fairness.
CX leaders studying these examples recognize that policy-level transformation can be a powerful enabler of trust. It builds the social license brands need to operate credibly in modern markets.
Integrating Economic Insight into Experience Design
How can CX and EX professionals apply lessons from competition economics? Here are tangible approaches:
- Embed “market ethics” in design thinking. Just as designers use user empathy, decision-makers should use fairness empathy — testing whether policies or pricing could damage institutional trust.
- Model the competitive impact of customer policies. Before launching exclusive programs or partnerships, simulate how they appear to regulators and customers. Is it loyalty or lock-in?
- Train CX teams in economic literacy. Understanding basic regulatory principles helps prevent service decisions that create market imbalance or invite scrutiny.
- Collaborate with economists in journey mapping. Quantitative elasticity modeling can reveal how pricing or market constraints influence customer journey bottlenecks.
- Use data responsibly and openly. Transparency in data use reduces regulatory risk while strengthening consumer perception of integrity.
From Market Power to Empowered Customers
At its core, competition law safeguards the same principle that CX champions — empowerment. Both disciplines emphasize enabling choice, reducing friction, and building equitable participation across ecosystems.
Dr. Wainscoat’s statement, “I look forward to providing clients with clear and focused advice for informing high-stakes decisions,” resonates beyond law firms and boards. It hints at the new collaborative energy between economic analysis and customer empathy.
When economists and experience designers speak the same language — backed by analytics, ethics, and empathy — organizations can anticipate change rather than merely react to it.
The Brattle Group’s Expanding Impact
The Brattle Group operates across four continents with more than 500 professionals, including leading academics and specialists. This scale allows its Antitrust and Competition team to integrate localized knowledge with global best practices — a vital advantage as markets become interdependent.
For clients in Asia-Pacific, Wainscoat’s leadership in Sydney promises deeper regional insight into evolving frameworks like Australia’s Competition and Consumer Act reforms or digital platforms regulation. For CX professionals, that means access to clearer guidance on where competitive integrity intersects with experience strategy.
As industries digitize and boundaries blur, this synthesis of economics and customer value becomes central to maintaining both compliance and differentiation.
Rethinking CX Governance Through a Competition Lens
Forward-thinking organizations now treat CX, legal, and regulatory divisions not as silos but as co-designers of enterprise reputation. Every anti-competitive behavior — real or perceived — now leaves an immediate imprint on brand sentiment.
In global surveys by Deloitte and McKinsey, over 60% of consumers reported boycotting brands they viewed as unfair or overly dominant. This highlights how ethical competition has become part of the CX brand promise.
Forward CX boards should integrate ongoing collaboration with competition economists to:
- Co-develop responsible pricing frameworks.
- Anticipate antitrust risks in partnership or acquisition strategies.
- Align internal incentives around fairness metrics alongside NPS or CSAT scores.
This is no longer optional governance — it’s a strategic necessity for retaining trust in interconnected digital economies.
Actionable Takeaways for CX and EX Leaders
- View market regulation as a customer trust tool. Compliance is no longer just legal hygiene; it’s a CX differentiator.
- Engage economists early in experience innovation. Collaborative forecasting prevents market missteps that erode credibility.
- Develop a “fairness scorecard.” Measure how your organization’s policies impact customer perceptions of choice and equity.
- Integrate ethical foresight training in EX programs. Empower employees to recognize when strategies might cross fairness boundaries.
- Champion open ecosystems. Encourage interoperability and partnerships that empower end-users rather than confine them.
The Strategic Horizon Ahead
By welcoming experts like Dr. Luke Wainscoat, The Brattle Group reinforces that the future of competition is deeply human. As digital transformation accelerates, economic fairness becomes an extension of customer experience itself.
For CX and EX professionals, the message is clear: understanding competition dynamics isn’t just about avoiding legal pitfalls — it’s about designing experiences customers can trust.
And trust, in the long run, is the most unassailable competitive advantage any organization can build.
