18-Harvest, probe or disrupt?

What business strategies justify major new investment in customer engagement infrastructure—purchase of your technology?

GROWTH STRATEGIES START WITH KEEN INSIGHTS

Game-changing innovations and, in particular, breakthrough customer engagement systems often start with a pivotal insight: a new, distinctive enhancement to the customer’s experience of overall value and satisfaction.

The figure below depicts several dimensions of game-changing innovations. The breakthrough entails the fully realized vision of a new or richer satisfaction experienced by current customers or prospective customers.

Service of needs represent the current operational capabilities of the firm—systems, processes, and accountabilities—in satisfying customer needs. While these operational capabilities constitute a primary asset or value-making resource of the firm, in the context of new markets, new customers, and disruption, the asset of a well-oiled service-fulfillment process may become a liability.

Knowledge of needs represent a firm’s listening and analytic capabilities: how well a selling organization listens to, understands, and responds to individual customers. We make the case that multichannel analytics will play a pivotal role in modeling the needs of customers, combining attitudinal and behavioral data with economic and demographic data to produce penetrating insights about current and emerging needs.

THREE BASIC STRATEGIES

Harvesting value often becomes a de facto growth strategy, simply finding more customers with needs similar to those of existing customers. Recent research of customers and buying criteria indicates that the harvesting value strategy has achieved or will soon achieve a level of diminishing returns: additional investments in finding similar customers provide lower and lower returns. Why?

End-use customers (households and businesses) also innovate along many fronts, rendering each household or business more unique unto itself than more common and similar to other households or businesses. Individual wants and desires will continue to de-massifiy markets into microniches and, ultimately, markets of one.

As a result, the self-declared needs of end-use customers will become more unique, requiring more acute and agile servicing of those needs by trusted vendors.

Probe and test become especially powerful when coupled with behavioral and attitudinal data collection systems and multimodal content and dynamic messaging—all core systems of customer engagement infrastructure.

Multichannel analytics uncover a new or emerging need; this enables account managers to assemble multimodal content to address those needs and customer groups; dynamic messaging validates uptake or consideration by targeted customers.

Market disruption represents a de facto reality for most firms.

In the short span of the next five years, two more billion people will come onto the Web and three billion people will get their first mobile phones.

In that same five-year span, the common personal computer and smart mobile phone will become 10 times faster or 10 times cheaper. In ten years, everything becomes 100 times faster or cheaper. In 15 years, everything becomes 1000 times faster or cheaper. Think: giga-pixel camera phones.

Network connectivity will span the globe and become at least 10 times faster and 100 times cheaper.

In that same five-year span, social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn will each connect one billion people with at least 200 million people using Facebook or its lifestyle equivalent 50 times a day.

These social networks will become a nation of tribes and best-friends pods, integrating the many and diverse intelligences of their members and creating wicked-smart consumers and consumption critics.

In that same five-year span, search engines will become “autonomic,” dynamically linking individual users and their engagement preferenda to GPS-based locations, narratives, and reasons to engage in all manner of social and economic “conversations.”

Perhaps the biggest disruption of the next five years will constitute the near-complete disappearance of the anonymous Web or store visitor. Vendors will know the basic information about all or most consumers, way before an individual consumer thinks about engaging the vendor.

Given these assumptions, marketing as we know it will disappear. So, you’re automating what today?

If you or your customers need to develop a more comprehensive set of futures from which work backward and envision a needed customer engagement strategy…call us. We can help!

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