Building Relevance from Disconnection

Are we living in the Age of Disconnection? We all feel it, even if we can’t put a name to it.

The latest evidence is from Accenture, with their latest report is titled “The Human Paradox: From Customer Centricity to Life Centricity.”

As always, it's high-quality content that provides a tremendous amount of insight into the world we live in.

Look, I know we’re all “up to here” (as my Grandma used to say) with this seismic shift talk. We just want it to be over…not even go back to before, just stop changing.

We need to be grownups, though. That’s not happening. Accenture research shows that the number of consumers reimagining what is important to them continues to grow even after the pandemic happened. We may well be facing the idea that the pandemic wasn't the event but the start of the event.

As people become more self-reliant, they are also rethinking the values that drive them. Up to two-thirds of consumers say they have completely reimagined what’s important to them in life—a 10 percentage point increase over the prior year. And up to 62% say many new things are important to them because of what’s going on globally and locally.

My observation would be that we tend to be one step behind the world. That's because our operating system is to observe and react. I'm not that sure that ever worked very effectively but it is not working now.

The research (in the chart below) illustrates the result of our observe-and-react approach. The gap between what companies are investing in and what consumers expect is real. The report calls this a “crisis of relevance” and I think you would have to agree.

There is another way.

The key takeaway from the report is that companies need to be life centric. We spent so much time learning to be customer-centric and yet today we find ourselves needing to look beyond the transaction to maintain relevance.

It’s about more than customers. I believe that resilient organizations proactively build strong relationships across their stakeholder base, as opposed to trying to respond to specific threats or even worse predict the threats that might be coming down the line. Being relevant to all your stakeholders is critical to that resilience.

Insights:

We need to learn to think of our B2B customers as consumers.

Without doubt, the nature of the transactions we have in B2B are often significantly different than they are and B2C. You can’t tell me, though, that the person who spends the weekend panic-buying toilet paper is a different person when they get to their corporate purchasing department—-or the C-Suite. They are subject to the same pressures, to the same stress and to the same anxiety from uncontrollable events.

Your Customer Journey Maps and Personas Aren’t Working

Research confirms what I have been saying about personas and other segmentation processes. They aren’t working. Accenture shows that 69% of global consumers admit to acting inconsistently to prioritize their needs. I wonder where that is on your customer journey or persona map. Customers are “multidimensional” and yet we see them as being on a journey we designed. Frankly, even our funnel model is way too neat and orderly to reflect what really goes on. I would point you instead to Google’s work on the messy middle.

Technology will not save you

I found this LinkedIn post courtesy of my friend Sean Williams down at Bowling Green State University, excerpted below.

1) Customers want, desire and expect something more or different from you, and you're either not listening or unwilling to meet those expectations, and

2) Your marketing department continually takes the money you could use to solve #1 and over-invests it in hot new tech and platforms, even though those same strategies have failed through each wave of hot new tech and platforms.

Related, from Laurie Anderson an expert in the latest techno-savior, AI.

“One of my favorite quotes about technology is from my meditation teacher: ‘If you think technology will solve your problems, you don’t understand technology—and you don’t understand your problems.’”

Understanding, Relationships, and Agility will save you

Not a new platform. Not the metaverse. Not AI. Those are tools but they are not saviors.

Invest in agility and build from relationships. Our current model of observe-and-react simply will not work. We need to invest in resilience and agility. In my Resilient5 model, I envision that as the way a skyscraper is designed to sway with changes like an earthquake as opposed to be fortified against them. This research from Accenture makes it clear that companies will want to build resilience into their organizations with ongoing stakeholder communications that build trust and relevance in today's world. This will often be messy and sometimes uncomfortable.

And yet necessary