There is a person missing from most customer reports. The report can show who bought, who renewed, who complained and who left. It is less articulate about the prospect who arrived with intent, moved through the process and vanished one step before the sale. No cancellation. No angry message. Often, no name. Brian R. King has been paying attention to that quiet departure since well before online retailers turned abandoned carts into a standard graph.
In 2004, King co-authored a paper with James G. Barnes and Gordon A. Breen called The almost customer: A missed opportunity to enhance corporate success. The title carries the entire problem inside it. Traditional defection research begins after a company wins somebody. King and his collaborators moved the starting line. A business can lose a willing person before the relationship is formally recorded, sometimes because a single interaction changed the decision to buy.
That idea is unusually durable. Twenty-two years later, King is Chief Marketing Officer at Munn Insurance in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador. Insurance still runs on trust, explanations, forms, handoffs and anxious moments. A prospect may be one unclear answer or one tedious screen away from becoming an almost customer. King's career has unfolded inside that gap between interest and confidence.
The customer before the customer
The almost-customer paper examined people who were ready to purchase but did not. It reviewed the familiar management literature on satisfaction, loyalty and retention, then asked what those frameworks overlooked. The answer was the pre-purchase defector. A company might diagnose churn with care while remaining blind to the willing buyer it lost at the front door.
The invisible defection
The management trap: measuring loyalty only after acquisition leaves the earliest defection outside the dataset.
The research was not a stray academic detour. King's public record keeps circling the same issue. He attended Memorial University of Newfoundland, graduated on the Dean's List and was admitted to Beta Gamma Sigma, the international business honor society. His related work on the almost customer was selected for a services research conference in Paris. The published paper earned a highly commended distinction from Emerald and was identified in his professional profile as one of 50 notable management articles submitted across the publisher's journals that year.
By 2011, King was Vice President, Marketing at Johnson Insurance. When the company received the highest score in its region in a J.D. Power home-insurance satisfaction study, his language centered on delivery: providing strong service was the primary focus, he said, and the commitment had to be renewed every day. The quotation matters less as corporate celebration than as evidence of continuity. King was still describing marketing through the customer's lived experience.
“At Munn, our goal is to be better today than we were yesterday. Standing still is not an option, or else you will be passed.”Brian King, Chief Marketing Officer, Munn Insurance
A marketer crosses into operations
King arrived at Munn in 2016 with a broad brief: lead marketing, accelerate the independent broker's digital evolution and help develop business strategy. When a new executive team took effect on January 1, 2019, Munn put King in the CMO seat alongside leaders responsible for customer care, operations and finance. His remit covered brand and marketing, but also corporate strategy and the operation as a whole.
That structure reflects a useful truth about customer experience. People do not encounter an org chart. A clear advertisement can lead to a difficult form. A fast quote can lead to a slow handoff. A warm promise can meet a rigid system. If marketing owns only the promise, it cannot repair the journey. King's role at Munn put marketing nearer to the mechanisms that keep or break that promise.
The company announcement credited him with helping improve lead generation and sales performance while advancing Munn as a digital broker. Those outcomes sit on opposite sides of the same lever. Lead generation creates more opportunities. Better systems keep more of those opportunities from turning into almost customers.
In a Digital Nova Scotia member feature, King described the less glamorous evidence of change. Munn had moved toward a near-paperless operation. Filing cabinets and piles of policy documents were fading from daily work. Technology was being used to automate repetitive tasks so employees could work more efficiently. Online quoting offered a route for customers who wanted to shop from home, while the brokerage continued to emphasize local people and claims support.
The balance is the important part. Digital convenience and human service are often pitched as rivals. For an insurance broker, they can be successive layers. Software handles the repeatable work. People handle the ambiguity, explanation and reassurance. The better the first layer performs, the more attention remains for the second.
The overnight test
Digital programs are easy to praise in a presentation. Munn's arrived at a harsher test when lockdown closed the workplace. King recalled that the company ended one day in the office and was fully operational from home the next morning. Customers, he said, did not notice an erosion in service quality.
The anecdote makes technology concrete. A voice system, data tracking and integration with the broker-management platform were not merely an IT inventory. Together they created continuity. Employees could work elsewhere without making customers absorb the disruption. Years of preparation became visible precisely because the transition felt uneventful.
“When COVID forced us into a lockdown, we closed at the end of the work day and we were fully operational, working from home the next morning.”Brian King on Munn's digital readiness
King also connected automation to employee experience. Removing repetitive and mundane tasks, he said, helped people enjoy their jobs more. This widens the almost-customer idea. Friction is not only something a buyer encounters. It can accumulate behind the counter, where employees repeat low-value steps, search across systems and spend energy on process instead of judgment. Employee effort eventually becomes customer waiting.
His colleagues' public recommendations add texture to the operating style. Former collaborators describe an authentic leader, a mentor and coach, a committed worker who delivered on time and kept work lighthearted enough to support morale. The formal record supports the coaching theme: King received RSA's Global Sales Coach of the Year recognition, was one of seven Canadian Platinum Club recipients and completed the company's worldwide executive development program as one of 12 participants.
Growth without losing the plot
Munn's stated ambition in the digital feature was expansion and substantial growth. King spoke of a young, dynamic team, entry into new markets and constant evaluation of technology that could create more value for customers. Ambition of that kind creates its own risk. Every added market, channel and system can introduce another seam where a prospective buyer gets lost.
That is why the old research question remains useful. Where does the willing person stop? Was the quote hard to understand? Did the handoff erase context? Did speed replace reassurance, or did reassurance arrive too slowly? A company does not need to romanticize the customer to investigate those moments. It needs to observe the journey before the purchase and treat silence as data.
Insurance makes this discipline especially tangible. The product is a promise about a future event, written in language most people do not use every day. Price matters, but so do comprehension and confidence. An independent broker adds another layer: it searches among multiple insurers, then translates the choices into a decision a household or business can live with. Each stage creates useful choice and possible friction at the same time. King's work sits at that junction. Marketing brings the prospect to the conversation. Data can show where journeys stall. Digital tools can shorten the routine steps. A local adviser can interpret what remains. The arrangement works only when those parts remember one another. A fast form that produces confusion has not finished the job; a careful explanation that arrives after the prospect has left is equally incomplete. The almost customer is therefore more than a sales leak. It is a diagnostic for the whole operating system.
King's public work outside pure sales also keeps the local context in view. In June 2025, Munn identified him as the representative making a company donation connected to the Janeway Miracle Match Telethon. The moment fits an independent Atlantic Canadian brokerage that talks about community and local claims service alongside digital quoting. Scale may come through systems, but trust is still accumulated in places.
There is no grand mystery in King's through-line. He has spent more than two decades working on a deceptively ordinary business problem: make it easier for people to continue. The paper supplied a name. His executive career supplied the machinery. The almost customer remains just out of sight, but no longer outside the frame.