What’s Driving Digital Transformation Across Organizations?
Building on his 2014 research of digital transformation, principal analyst Brian Solis studied how companies are changing, and the challenges and opportunities they face while undergoing a digital transformation. Based on insights and data from more than 500 digital strategists and executives, the report found that companies are still facing significant challenges to operating in a digital economy.
The report, “The 2016 State of Digital Transformation,” shares the latest facts and figures on the top drivers, challenges and best practices of companies that are undergoing a digital transformation.
Key Findings
In our research, we identified key insights and trends impacting companies going through a digital transformation.
Customer Experience (CX) remains the top driver of digital transformation but IT and marketing still influence technology investments
55% of those responsible for digital transformation cite “evolving customer behaviors and preferences” as the primary catalyst for change. Yet, the number one challenge facing executives (71%) is understanding behavior or impact of the new customer
Only half (54%) of survey respondents have completely mapped out the customer journey. This means that many companies are changing without true customer-centricity 41% of leaders surveyed said they’ve witnessed an increase in market share due to digital transformation efforts, and 37% cite a positive impact on employee morale
The CMO vs. CIO: Digital transformation is largely led by the CMO (34%) not the CIO/CTO (19%)
Innovation tops digital transformation initiatives at companies today. 81% said it was at the top of their agenda, 46% stated their company has launched a formal “innovation center.” Right behind innovation was modernizing IT infrastructure (80%) and improving operational agility (79%)
Undergoing a digital transformation? Contact us for a digital maturity assessment.
To help companies navigate the digital transformation journey, Altimeter and Prophet have developed a diagnostic that assesses a company’s digital maturity. The tool provides an objective look at the current digital state vs. ideal future state while identifying major perceived gaps and opportunities that can be pursued as part of the digital transformation journey. Contact us today to learn more.
How Companies Are Investing in the Digital Customer Experience
Digital transformation isn’t a trend owned by a particular role, nor a discipline that belongs to one department alone. It is, however, a significant movement where daring business leaders venture into tomorrow’s markets, today.
In 2013, Altimeter researched how businesses explore digital transformation. One finding revealed that while the word “digital” is part of “digital transformation,” the essence of digital transformation comes down to people and how their digital behaviors differ from that of the traditional customers before them. It’s also more than that.
In our initial report on the topic, Digital Transformation: Why and How Companies Are Investing in New Business Models to Lead Digital Customer Experiences, we set out to determine how digital transformation unified disparate digital efforts under a common vision. In the process, we uncovered a more human story. We followed up our initial research with a 2014 survey, aimed at digital strategists, to further understand the state of digital transformation.
This report shares its results and is designed to complement Altimeter’s annual State of Social Business report. Combined, this research helps strategists drive social business evolution and digital transformation based on insight from peers and market leaders.
Tapping into the power of an engaged social workforce
The use of employees to advocate on behalf of their brand is nothing new, but a combination of market forces and growing comfort with social business has created a tipping point for the growth of formalized Employee Advocacy programs. In Ed Terpening’s latest report, he surveyed brand leaders, employees and consumers to understand employee advocacy. His research uncovered motivations for companies investing in employee advocacy programs; what motivates employees to share information about their workplace; and what employee-driven content resonates most with customers.
Key Findings
90% of brands surveyed are already pursuing or have plans to pursue some form of employee advocacy
Consumer response to employee posts often outperform traditional digital advertising results
21% of consumers report “liking” employee posts – a far higher engagement rate than the average social ad
Employee advocacy drives employee engagement. When employees are asked how they felt after sharing work-related content, the leading response was “I feel more connected and enthusiastic about the company I work for”
Employee advocacy supports employment branding. When asked which employee-shared content consumers found most relevant, recruiting rose to the top
Interestingly, European consumers are less likely to be interested in a connection’s posts about work and European employees are less likely to share work-related content.
Europeans have a stronger preference for keeping work and home life separate: 44% of Europeans cited this as a reason for not sharing work-related content, compared to only 23% of North American
By focusing more on the executional arms of content development and content marketing instead of a holistic content strategy, organizations can end up producing large volumes of content without a clear purpose or sense of direction. In addition, the different departments that deploy content can end up producing material with differing (and often competing) objectives. With limited resources and digital real estate for engaging customers, it’s crucial that the entire organization work off a single, coherent content strategy that explicitly states who the brand’s customer is, what is the major need or problem they have, and how the brand will fulfill that need using content.
Through our research, we found that companies with successful content strategies had clarity around what they wanted the content to do for their customers and strong criteria for what they would and wouldn’t publish. Our methodology for narrowing this focus for companies to choose one of five major content strategy archetypes:
Content as Presence
Content as a Window
Content as Currency
Content as Community
Content as Support
Key Findings
This report helps companies decide which archetype is best suited to help them deliver on a customer’s need while also meeting a business goal. It then walks through the sequence of steps that build upon this archetype to create a formalized strategy that minimizes content waste, aligns multiple teams around a common vision and helps them deliver on a unified customer experience.
In our research, we learned that digital transformation is a movement progressing without a universal map to guide businesses through proven and productive passages. This leaves organizations pursuing change from a known, safe approach that correlates with “business as usual” practices. Operating within the confines of traditional paradigms without purpose or vision eventually challenges the direction, capacity, and agility for thriving in a digital economy.
After several years of interviewing those helping to drive digital transformation, we have identified a series of patterns, components and processes that form a strong foundation for change. We have organized these elements into six distinct stages:
Business as Usual
Present and Active
Formalized
Strategic
Converged
Innovative and Adaptive
Collectively, these phases serve as a digital maturity blueprint to guide purposeful and advantageous digital transformation. Our research of digital transformation is centered on the digital customer experience (DCX) and thus reflects one of many paths toward change. We found that DCX was an important catalyst in driving the evolution of business, in addition to technology and other market factors.
Why be one of many in a crowded category, when you can create one you can have all to yourself?
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Summary
David Aaker says that brands today should actively search for ways to define new subcategories with unique attributes that cannot be duplicated by competitors.
6 Actions to Build an Insurance Service Strategy that Drives Growth
Our research finds that consumers expect more, and want products combined with services.
Over the past several years insurance companies have faced increased product commoditization due to ubiquitous online presence, more sophisticated aggregators and the increased availability of insurance products. They are faced with the challenge of driving growth while managing their risk profiles to be less capital-intensive. In a market with heightened expectations for digital experiences – which the COVID-19 pandemic raised even more – the likes of Oscar, Lemonade and other new DTC market entrants are raising consumer expectations, spurring companies to develop more experience-led strategies to drive engagement and value. Then there’s other players like American Express and Chase making their play.
Where should insurers look to drive growth?
Against this backdrop, Life, Health and P&C insurers are turning to new services to drive growth and engagement. Services create more compelling and differentiated solutions that focus on customer needs, going above and beyond basic insurance coverages. This enables insurers to identify new streams of less capital-intensive revenue and increase demand for existing products – especially in a category that has historically struggled to drive engagement at moments outside of the core product moments (e.g., purchase, premium payment and claim).
Based on our extensive experience and research within the industry, integrating a services strategy also translates into impactful business outcomes for insurers globally – from initial purchase intent to long-term customer retention. The results speak for themselves:
Customers were twice as interested in an insurance product when sold with relevant services (Source: Prophet Insurer Research)
The presence of services impacts broker interest with three-quarters of brokers stating that services are critical to their choice of provider when recommending to clients (Source: Prophet Insurer Research)
Insurers who offer three or more services on top of the core product see NPS increases between 20-40 points.
When it comes to services, who is doing it well?
Insurers are already recognizing the value services can bring both to their customers and their business. However, as many insurers do not have exclusive relationships with services providers, avoiding services replication across the industry is key. Insurers are therefore partnering and acquiring across the services ecosystem to uniquely deliver new customer value.
P&C providers are already seeing strong integration of services into their offers given their ability to utilize customer tracking and connected devices, not only providing product discounts but also additional services on-top. For example, Progressive Insurance has partnered with TrueMotion to launch Snapshot, a service that monitors and measures driver data through either their smartphones or a plug-in device. This enables customers to understand their driving habits and generate personal discounts. Progressive is continuing to explore expansions to the program and invest in partnerships to combat distracted driving.
“Integrating a services strategy also translates into impactful business outcomes for insurers globally – from initial purchase intent to long-term customer retention.”
Health and Life are also now capitalizing upon the opportunity to integrate services into their portfolios by exploring the way they can utilize health tracking to adjust premiums through improved health. From a global standpoint, Vitality is one example of a brand that has developed a personalized customer health and wellness tracking and support platform. In the U.S. specifically, John Hancock has partnered with Vitality to provide discounts and tailored recommendations to their customers based on their health tracking. While in Asia, AIA has made a focused push to expand the solutions they offer to customer across the region.
Health insurers also are exploring the role of partnerships with preventative health start-ups to help customers manage chronic illnesses. For example, Cigna has partnered with Omada Health to offer customers a personalized preventative health solution to mitigate risk against diabetes, heart disease and stroke.
Six actions for insurers to create impact and drive growth through services
We believe there are six actions insurers take to develop a winning services strategy:
Understand what customers want. What is the foundational understanding of customer wants and needs to guide services development?
Identify the business opportunity. What role could and should services play for your business and what business objectives should your services strategy inform (i.e., acquisition, incremental revenue, retention, efficiency)?
Prioritize unique and relevant services. What are the set of unique services most relevant to your customer base that you will prioritize developing?
Drive engagement. Where and when within the journey do customers become aware of services and how do we improve interest for them?
Improve the experience of access and use. What is the right experience behind driving easier services access and use to deliver greater customer value?
Identify the right internal owners. Who within the organization is responsible for funding, building and managing our services strategy?
Insurers are falling short on delivering value to customers. A well-defined services strategy can nurture customer relationships and earn loyalty to fuel growth.
If you’d like to learn more about the role of services and how we have helped leading insurance companies execute experience-led strategies that drive impact and engagement, get in touch.
The best stories grab attention and don’t let go, with interesting characters and intriguing details
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Summary
David Aaker says that brand marketers shouldn’t communicate important messages using facts, they should use signature stories. The narrative is more likely to capture the consumer’s attention, peak their interest and be remembered.
Using Anniversaries to Reinforce Your Brand Purpose
Annual events can strengthen and reinforce important values, helping to tell different stories.
It is more important than ever for companies to have a brand purpose. To remain relevant to their customers, companies need to find opportunities to share that purpose with the world and in turn, also become inspiring places to work for their employees.
A powerful way to reinforce a brand’s value to both internal and external audiences is through brand anniversaries.
They are also an opportunity to celebrate the past while setting up a vision for the future.
In the past few years, many iconic brands have used key anniversary milestones to strengthen ties with their stakeholders and build brand perceptions around a strong purpose. But anniversary celebrations can be used in different strategic ways as well. We’ve identified 3 ways brands can make the most of their anniversary through a focused strategy.
3 Ways Brands Can Use Anniversaries to Reinforce Their Brand’s Purpose
Reinforce the Core
For example, Marvel Studios used its 10-year anniversary to engage core fans and drive loyalty through its “More Than a Hero” campaign. The branding campaign kicked off with a week-long event showcasing 20 Marvel movies in IMAX theaters. Marvel also released behind-the-scenes, never-before-seen footage and launched a sweepstake for fans to share their favorite Marvel memory on social media.
Through these activities and content, they successfully engaged tens of thousands of fans in live events and via anniversary videos on YouTube (which received over two million views), helping to cement loyalty for the franchise.
Strengthen Your Image
Swiss Re celebrated its 150th anniversary by engaging stakeholders worldwide to participate in collaborative dialogues on important topics of our time, such as advancing sustainable energy solutions, funding longer lives and partnering for food security. To achieve its goals, Swiss Re launched The Open Minds Forum around the world, discussing ground-breaking ideas and exploring fresh perspectives on the risks facing generations to come. Employees were also encouraged to write articles and share their perspectives.
The anniversary celebration helped Swiss Re initiate conversations around business and societal risks with its customers and reinforced the brand image of being ‘smarter together,’ by creating a dialogue with people around the world.
Shift the Narrative
For its centennial anniversary, BMW launched “The Next 100 Years”, a year-long integrated campaign to strengthen its brand worldwide. As part of the campaign, the company revealed four concept cars and released “The Next 100” publication to invite industry experts & pioneer thinkers to envision the future of BMW. They interacted with consumers digitally through curated content on a dedicated centennial website, live discussions on social media platforms, and AR/VR interaction through the ‘BMW VISIONS’ mobile app.
These anniversary celebrations bolstered BMW’s status as a future shaper by gathering hundreds of thousands of guests and consumers to join celebration events in person or online.
How Do Anniversary Celebrations Help to Amplify Brand Purpose?
While each of these celebrations took on different forms and focused on different objectives, there were four guiding principles they each followed which made them successful:
Be authentic: For any anniversary celebration, you need to stay true to your brand DNA in everything you do and say
Be clear: You need to have clear objectives and create a single, overarching theme to align all activities and leave stakeholders with a clear understanding of what your brand stands for
Be targeted: You must consider what you represent to different stakeholders and design specific ways to engage each of them appropriately
Be bold and brilliant: To deliver impact, you must activate at sufficient scale and frequency to get noticed and to show the company in a new light
Anniversaries are a great time for celebration and a great opportunity to reinforce your brand purpose. To get the most out of the milestone, they require a deliberate approach. As you plan your next brand anniversary make sure you do four key things:
Align on the vision, with clear objectives and a creative theme that will serve as the guiding foundation to engage all stakeholders
Plan the experiences throughout the campaign and define the desired interaction and requirements
Design and develop unique content to bring the experience to life at each touchpoint – spanning digital & physical and internal & external
Prepare for activation with an integrated roadmap that pulls together all activities into a coherent campaign
Visions are compelling and unifying. Just make sure you can really bring it to life.
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Summary
What do you want your brand to stand for? The answer to this question usually leads to 2-3 attributes that differentiate your brand, resonate with your target audience and drive your brand-building programs.
The Mind, Body and Soul of Healthcare’s Consumer-Centric Transformation
Change requires that leaders clarify purpose, articulate cultural expectations and alter incentives.
In today’s environment, patients are increasingly becoming “e-consumers” and that is a good thing. Despite its name, e-consumer is not a technical term. The concept of the “e-patient,” was coined in the 1990s by the late Tom Ferguson, M.D., an American physician who advocated for increasing the role of the patient in managing their own healthcare. E-patients, he says, are empowered, engaged, equipped and enabled. While the concept of the e-patient is limited to direct interactions with healthcare organizations, we have expanded and evolved it into the e-consumer. Read more here.
If healthcare organizations are to serve the e-consumer and engage, empower, equip and enable them, they too will need to make a shift by putting the consumer at the center of all they do.
Challenges of Consumer-Centric Healthcare
Expanding from patient-first to consumer-first thinking.
Being consumer-first even when it conflicts with being physician-first.
Neither is an easy task, and both demand a change in both organization and culture for most healthcare organizations.
Our colleague Tony Fross writes about the “mind, body and soul” of digital transformation, but this model is also relevant for the consumer-centric healthcare transformation (digital or otherwise). In this Prophet model, an organization first determines what it wants its DNA to be – its purpose, its brand proposition and/or its strategic plan to win. Next, it goes to work on the “mind” (its talent, capabilities, and skills), the “body” (governance, process and tools) and the “soul” (its values, behaviors and rituals).
Based on our findings, to be a consumer-centric healthcare organization, you must take the following steps:
1. Inspire the Team
Healthcare organizations may have a vision of where they want to go, but they need internal support to get there. “We didn’t develop a consumer- and patient-centric strategy for the sake of hanging it up on the wall,” says Kevin Brown, President and CEO of Piedmont Healthcare. “The patient is at the center of all that we do. We’re living and breathing it. It is how we manage, run meetings, prioritize initiatives, approve capital, hire talent.” Consumer-centric healthcare transformation must be activated at the ground level, and healthcare organizations can successfully inspire their employees in several ways; for example, demonstrate leadership role modeling, codify cultural expectations, co-create cultural expectations and make it personal.
Leadership Teams Need to Model Consumer-Centric Behaviors
Inspiring employees to embrace consumer-centricity requires vocal leaders, who demonstrate their commitment through actions. It is important to have leaders who are on board with pursuing consumer-centricity, as their behaviors set a precedent for the broader organization.
Articulate Cultural Expectations
Much like an organization’s definition of consumer-centricity, a consumer-obsessed culture is most impactful when outlined in a tangible manner and built into the organization’s processes. By articulating the culture through behavioral expectations, organizations can help employees understand what consumer-centricity means to them and what it looks like when carried out on a day-to-day basis.
“The patient is at the center of all that we do. We’re living and breathing it. It is how we manage, run meetings, prioritize initiatives, approve capital, hire talent.”
Tap Employees for New Definitions
In addition to articulating what consumer-centricity means, employees must derive personal meaning from it. That is particularly important, as employees are often the ones who interact with consumers and care for patients. Leadership can help employees find personal meaning through co-creation. After a merger, Indiana University Health (IUH) needed to integrate acquired and legacy cultures. The organization took the time to understand the needs, wants, and aspirations, both personally and professionally, of their employees to co-create a promise that was common to both its employees and members of the communities in which they lived. “Not everyone got the old promise, particularly our professional staff. With [the new one], everyone gets it. Can we show that we’re reinforcing this promise with actions and decisions? We have to do it for every patient, every interaction. That’s the next big step we’re working through,” says CEO Dennis Murphy.
Make Consumer-Centric Healthcare Personal
There is no question that healthcare is personal. Whether undergoing treatment or taking care of a sick loved one, we all experience healthcare at a deeply individual level. Sometimes, organizations can make consumer-centricity more powerful when leaders emphasize the personal aspect. That requires leaders to find their own source of inspiration so they can constantly remind the organization who they are serving each day, why their work matters and why the experience should be among the best in any category.
2. Enable Successful Employers
The executives we interviewed described many ways to enable their employees, including creating new working environments, reimagining traditional business functions and putting purpose over process.
Create Environments That Reinforce the Culture You Want
As healthcare evolves, the demands of employees at healthcare organizations need to evolve as well – and in some cases, change altogether. To solve that challenge, leaders are spending time with companies like Google to understand and replicate some aspects of the culture that those organizations have created to enable both digitally-minded and healthcare-minded people to thrive. If it takes bean bags and dartboards and modifying the dress code, so be it.
Remake Functions and Functional Expectations
In an effort to better address consumers’ questions at their first touchpoint, Florida Blue revamped its customer-service function. By investing in systems that aggregate data across formerly disparate platforms, employees were now empowered with the right tools and information to answer questions, as well as offer solutions and value outside of the immediate issue at hand. The tools don’t just enable employees to do their job; instead, they enable employees to do their job in service of the consumer, which ensures both internal and external impact.
Demand Focus on Purpose Over Process
As healthcare organizations shift their mindset, they may find that their current processes are not conducive to consumer-centricity. Great processes, whether operational or strategic, should be informed by asking how the organization can deliver the best outcome for consumers. Starting with this question leads to clarity of purpose for building a consumer-centered organization. This purpose-first, process-second philosophy better enables employees to deliver on a consumer-centric strategy instead of being inhibited by legacy processes and protocols. Healthcare organizations can empower employees to drive consumer-centricity by ensuring process doesn’t get in the way of progress (or purpose).
3. Incentivize the Team
Once employees have embraced consumer-centricity and have the tools to deliver it, they still may require an extra push to act. For some, cultural transformation requires an enormous shift in their day-to-day lives. Organizations can help by incentivizing their employees and teams personally, professionally and financially.
Establish Metrics That Drive Change
Mobilizing around consumer-centricity requires top-to-bottom alignment on common goals. Organizations need to establish clear metrics that reinforce consumer-centricity to the overall business strategy. If organizations value and reward only non-consumer metrics like revenue or operating efficiency, then progress on those metrics is all that will be delivered. Having consumer metrics, even ones as simple as satisfaction, is critical to showing and driving a true commitment to consumer-centricity. It changes employees’ motivations and behaviors, which are both critical components of culture.
Leaders are rethinking what they measure, moving from measures tied to satisfaction (e.g., Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and System, NHS Patient Satisfaction Surveys) to measures tied to loyalty (e.g., Net Promoter Score or NPS). Relationship-oriented metrics help paint a fuller picture of the experience and will compel functions across the organization to establish ways of working that address the experience holistically.
Link New Strategies to People’s Pay
Putting compensation and promotions on the line is a sure-fire way to change behavior. However, incentives alone are not enough to drive results. Instilling lasting cultural change requires that employees have a clear understanding of specific performance objectives, behaviors and actions needed to drive improvements tied to consumer-centricity.
To set a foundation for its cultural transformation, Anthem looked at its key metrics and realized that, while consumer-centric measures were in place, the organization lacked clarity around creating real change. Executive leadership endorsed NPS as its key metric and tied it to executive compensation, resulting in a focus on relationship building with consumers. “Once it affected everyone’s bonus, the demand to meet with and discuss the metric took off,” says Doug Cottings, Staff Vice President, Market Strategy & Insights at Anthem.
While changing the mind, body and soul of an organization is difficult, there are tangible steps that organizations can take to get started. With employees who understand, embrace and live consumer-centricity, organizations can both win with and create more e-consumers.
Ready to partner with us to become a consumer-centric healthcare organization? Reach out today.
M&A Portfolios: Are You Thinking Like a Digital Native?
Companies need radical flexibility, not “house of brands” hang-ups.
After several quarters of near-frenzy pace, global deal-making is starting to slow. But for those in charge of managing portfolio and architecture strategy, the recent mergers and acquisition binge is creating something of a mess.
Many of the decisions about customers, brands and marketing have been addressed too quickly as deals were coming together. And once the integration process starts, those initial plans unravel. As the financial and operations teams that finalized deals hand them off to those responsible for taking new assets to market, tangles of false assumptions and the sub-optimal use of brand assets emerge; the value creation logic of the deal never gets out of the spreadsheet. And with $1.24 trillion in deals already on the books this year, that confusion presents material risk for shareholders.
Increasingly, clients are coming to us for help figuring out the best ways to organize and manage new, post-deal asset bases. Often, they start by asking: “Should we be a house of brands? Or a branded house?”
“Should we be a house of brands? Or a branded house?”
We’re not afraid to say that’s simply the wrong question. Digitally-focused companies can’t afford to think that way. The modern approach to architecture and portfolio strategy, and the one inherently chosen by digital natives, is radical flexibility.
Older companies are coming to understand this, too, focusing on customers earlier in the M&A process, aware that integration management offices are often working with incomplete data.
In order to get this right and maximize the value of today’s deals, we believe the best post-merger decisions come down to answering three essential questions.
Three Essential Questions For the Best M&A Portfolio Strategy
1. Are we customer-obsessed?
Our research on brand relevance offers compelling evidence that companies that are obsessed with customers significantly outperform others. It’s no surprise that the names that dominate the top of the Prophet Brand Relevance Index® are digital-first, including Apple, Amazon and Netflix. And those at the top of the list consistently outperformed the S&P 500 by 3x in revenue and 205x in profit in the last decade. These companies constantly ask themselves: Are we putting customer-use cases and environments first? All decisions are filtered through the perspective of customers and prospects.
When considering customers first—the buyers, the deciders–it’s easy to see how easily a company like Procter & Gamble and Schick might be outflanked. Direct-to-consumer brands like Dollar Shave Club and Harry’s have devoted themselves to changing and improving the razor shopping experience, rather than focusing on promotions and product features.
In post-M&A environments, brand portfolios should be built around key customer use cases, balancing the desire for efficiency with a customer-centric model that leverages the strongest brand for each use case. When J.P. Morgan & Co. and The Chase Manhattan Bank merged, they prioritized efficiency over customers and created a brand mash-up that weakened both brands. After a couple of years of brand value degradation, a new strategy that led with customer needs was founded with a powerful institutional brand, J.P. Morgan, and a powerful retail brand, Chase. This approach allows for effective targeting of clearly defined customer segments with separate brands and tailored offerings, and is paying off for JPMorgan Chase, with a five-year gain in brand value of 53%.
2. Can we find max value?
When M&A deals fail to generate revenue synergies, there is usually a lack of early focus on customer, marketing and branding issues. Playbooks often don’t include these steps and when they do, the discussions are qualitative and overly reliant on opinion and emotion.
The solution is in this key question: Are we deploying our assets to maximize customer use cases?
Companies can find significant incremental deal value when they integrate customer and marketing analytics in pre-close analysis and the integration management office. We studied one deal that doubled the final price of a $5 billion global asset by modeling the financial impact of future (post close) brand use cases. Another estimated market-share gains between 2 and 3% on a $60 billion deal through brand portfolio economic analysis. And on the cost side, we are helping companies lower post-merger migration costs between 15 and 40% by using cost-optimization analysis.
3. Are we serving up the right offer?
The best way to achieve this optimization is to constantly elevate the right offer for each person, on the right device and at the perfect time. Companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook and SAP are experts at this kind of hyper-responsiveness, with nearly-infinite capabilities for personalization, depending on the needs of each customer. They continually ask: Do we have an adaptive brand architecture? To win with today’s digitally demanding customers, companies need to maximize all the flexibility available through digital tools, making sure offers are as adaptive and individualized as possible.
Amazon remains a perfect example. Rather than being a monolithic Amazon or a fragmented collection of sub-brands, the brand adapts to its audience, use case or environment. Do you listen to a book at 9 p.m. each night? If so, it’s likely Amazon will push an Audible brand message just before. Recently ordered paper towels? Alexa will check-in to see if you need a refill. Context is king in our world, and successful companies will deliver an adaptive architecture that ensures maximum relevance.
Older companies don’t have to cede their future to those that came of age as digital natives. Moving forward, all companies–and all brands–can benefit from a modern portfolio and architecture strategy. And while all companies acknowledge that the future is digital, we’re convinced that those that win are those that also understand that the digital’s primary power is in better serving customers.
For more information on capturing greater value in the M&A, please contact us today.
