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Customer Transformation Leader, PwC US
Between elevated shareholder expectations and evolving customer behaviors, CMOs and their marketing teams should be obsessed with meaningful outcomes that can help increase business value. Achieving those outcomes starts with being centered around customers and anticipating how improving their experiences can strengthen your relationship with them.
Despite aspirations, not every company can connect with customers in multiple ways like an Amazon, Apple or Google. But consider how other businesses have responded to customer needs and preferences and reinvented themselves.
- Now famous as a jeweler, Tiffany & Co. began in 1837 as a stationery store, and its first mail-order catalog sold such items as horse whips and sugarplums.
- The cosmetics company Avon was founded in 1886 by a traveling book salesman who had offered beauty products as a gift before realizing that customers liked the free perfume better.
- Toy and game manufacturer Hasbro, known for Transformers, My Little Pony, Monopoly and Twister, started in 1923 as a distributor of fabric remnants. It then produced pencil cases and school supplies before making paint sets, doctor and nurse kits, and other toys in the 1940s.
All of these companies and their founders were willing to reassess their businesses, adapt to customer interests and go in a different direction. Companies today have more data and information than ever on their customers, but how well are you using that to assess customer attraction and determine if your business model can help deliver sustainable growth?
Tech should help realize customer opportunities and relay your values
Most companies might agree that success hinges on being useful to their customers, and they’re constantly exploring how technology investments can help accomplish that. But it takes more than a mindset of “Hey, everyone’s talking about generative AI. Let’s go buy some!”
In our experience, the key to customer attraction and retention is a focus on two elements that consumer and business buyers increasingly consider essential. First, look beyond a technology’s capabilities and determine the customer challenge you want to solve or customer opportunity you want to realize. That includes considering how your people will either use new technology or deliver it to customers. Second, understand the importance of values to customers — how your company isn’t just about revenues and profits but how it can benefit communities and society overall through your businesses, products and services.
Actions to drive customer attraction
Once you’ve committed to the above, you can dig into actions that help drive higher customer attraction and retention — and generate consistent revenue:
- Differentiated experiences and data-driven personalization: By understanding individual preferences and behaviors, you can offer customized products and services, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty. But you should balance personalization with privacy and use customer data ethically and transparently. That can build trust and set your company apart from competitors.
- Repeatable, long-term revenue growth: Inflation, interest rates and other aspects of the economy are real concerns. But short-term reflexes such as engaging in price wars are more likely to result in one-and-done transactions than ongoing relationships.
- Education and transparency: We’re at a critical junction point in the economy and society overall. Your organization should focus on issues that can affect millions of people and are relevant to your customers. Then you can better understand the relationships between those issues and how people and businesses spend their money.
Perhaps more important — both in the current uncertain landscape and for future growth — determine what can better promote profitability and contribute to tangible outcomes, not just higher brand awareness and better reputation. Before the “what,” such as new technology, confirm the “who.” Who is enabling whom within your organization to achieve the desired outcomes? Is the investment you’re considering aimed to help you achieve outcomes for your customers, help your customers achieve outcomes themselves or a combination of the two? Questions like these go a long way toward your company actually meaning something to your customers — and turning your obsession with outcomes into lasting business value.
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