Three Actions You Can Take Today To Make Your Organization More Consumer-Centric
Thor Olof Philogène, CEO and Founder of Stravito, an AI-powered knowledge management platform for market research and insights.
It’s no secret that happy customers make for a successful business—or that consumer perceptions and decisions determine the value of every brand. McKinsey & Company puts it like this: “You think you own your business, but you don’t. Customers do. Their perception determines what you can do: the competitors you can outperform, the trust you can command, the new business opportunities you can capture.”
I can’t think of a stronger statement as to why every business leader should want to put consumers at the center of their business decision-making process. In today’s digital age, consumer centricity has never been more important, as consumers have instant access to a wealth of information about your company and your competitors—and more flexibility than ever to choose yours, or not. And yet, achieving consumer centricity is challenging, especially for large global organizations. There are many reasons for this. Some are structural. Others are cultural. Some are grounded in basic human nature.
Today I am going to focus not on the challenges, but rather the solutions. To that end, here are three actions you as a leader can take to make your organization more consumer-centric.
1. Empower Every Team To Be Consumer-Centric
Most organizations assign various responsibilities to functional groups: R&D, consumer research, product development, marketing and so forth. Understanding the consumer typically becomes the sole responsibility of the consumer insights function. This concentration of functional responsibility might have some operational advantages, but it ultimately comes at a great cost.
When other groups throughout the organization are dependent on the consumer insights function to access insights, it creates bottlenecks and makes it difficult to incorporate insights into decision making.
That’s why in order to become a truly consumer-centric organization, you need to empower everyone in the organization to access, understand and integrate insights into their work. Sounds easy enough, but it is difficult in practice.
2. Use Data To Build Corporate 'Intuition'
Gut feelings are derived from a lifetime of experiences. They can be very valuable. After all, we rely on our experience to guide our day-to-day decision-making. But gut feelings can be misleading when the consumers we are trying to connect with have different experiences from our own—because of generation, culture, location, etc.
Such cognitive bias can blind us to what the data is trying to tell us. It is human nature to try to project ourselves onto the consumer. Trusting the data becomes difficult when the insights derived from that data differ from what our “gut” is telling us. This is why having quality consumer data is so important—to understand who your consumers really are, not who you think they are.
Insights derived from quality research enable product development, customer service and marketing teams to innovate. Quality research is the result of, among other things, asking the right questions. For example, in a blog about innovation, Boston Consulting Group suggests enterprise leaders ask their teams two questions: What is our view about future sources of value for customers? And, what are we doing that is deliberately contrary to the industry consensus?
Smart questions such as these drive the development of valuable insights into your consumers. Insights that may be contrary to your organization’s current practices or understanding about your consumers. This is why creating a culture around accessing quality research—and the resulting data and insights—is critical to innovation, growth and success.
3. Put Technology To Work For You
Information overload is a function of too much data and not enough insights. Combine this with not having the right data and insights available at the right time, and you’ve got the perfect storm for poor decision-making.
And it gets worse. Would it surprise you to learn that nearly half of corporate data—data your company paid for—goes unused, according to a global survey of 1,300 business and IT executives? This is the result of what some of our clients call “data graveyards,” data that gets lost in email inboxes, file folders or drives only a few people have access to, or even people’s personal g-drives. Meanwhile, the average knowledge worker spends nearly 20% of their time looking for information.
Setting your teams up to be consumer-centric is nearly impossible if they can’t easily find the insights they need to better understand the consumer.
Fortunately, there are new tools that can ensure the right information gets to the right people at the right time. For example, you can invest in an insights platform that uses machine learning to help people keep information organized, easy to find and readily available. The most advanced of such tools can even automatically surface new insights based on a person’s interests and access history—in much the same way Netflix makes movie recommendations based on a subscriber’s past viewing habits.
Be sure your insights platform is intuitive and easy to use. A platform that’s difficult to use can become a deterrent to accessing and using the very insights that are needed to drive consumer-centric behavior.
Armed with the right technology, your teams will avoid the many challenges of being consumer-centric so they can make the right decisions about what new products to invest in, what existing products to update and what marketing channels have the best chance of turning consumer interest into purchases.
Looking Forward
Becoming a consumer-centric organization is both essential to business success and a difficult undertaking. McKinsey’s insight is an excellent reminder of the power of consumers to make or break your brand. Implementing these three actions will move your organization in the direction of putting the consumer at the center of all of your company’s business processes.
