Five Ways To Win The Consumer Of 2030, Now

To win the data and technology-enabled “smart consumer” of tomorrow, discover the five things every consumer-facing business must do right now

- Kristina Rogers And Andrew Cosgrove

The leaders of every consumer-facing business recognise the need for transformation. Otherwise, their organisations risk becoming irrelevant to the changing consumer. Most are taking action, but they need to be bolder. They need to accelerate and redirect their efforts so they can move beyond protecting the business they have and put more focus on creating the business they need to become.

The five key imperatives set out below will help leaders reshape their organisations so they can generate value for the data- and technology-enabled “smart consumer” of tomorrow. They are drawn from our on-going collaboration with over 200 business leaders, futurists, and industry experts to model a 360-degree view of the future consumer and how their needs could change in a variety of “future world” scenarios.

FIVE KEY IMPERATIVES TO WIN THE FUTURE CONSUMER

1. Challenge every assumption: Shift your business model from incremental improvement to exponential change. Today, most companies are trying to protect a legacy of competitive advantage by leveraging their scale and finding incrementally better ways to do what they do already. But the degree and accelerating pace of consumer changes are turning heritage into baggage as trusted capabilities lose relevance.

A bolder shift requires vision and speed. Agile market entrants are using technology and new routes to market to shred incumbent business models. It took Halo Top just six years to become a best-selling ice cream brand. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos reminds his shareholders every year that, as far as he’s concerned, the company is at day one, every day. And as Peter Drucker said, “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”