Why imaginative customer-driven thinking boosts innovation and growth
It’s a given that truly understanding your customers is the key to success. But in today’s dynamic global consumer landscape, where customer-centric thinking is showing its shortcomings, brands must move beyond traditional data-led approaches if they want to tap into the real opportunities. Tom Wormald, Managing Partner at Yonder Consulting, offers an alternative. He explains the formula for a customer-driven strategy—one where businesses don’t just see things in black and white through the lens of customer data, but bring imagination into the mix to find previously unseen new ways to drive business strategy.
It is widely accepted that focusing on customers is an essential route to success for any business. But there is a danger that if done in the wrong way, customer-centric thinking can actually inhibit business success. It may turn into a defensive or a reactive mindset more to do with minimizing risk or cost, rather than as a source of opportunity and a route to transformative growth.
The problem is that if you only see your customers through the lens of your existing business, you inherently limit your understanding of them—and, more importantly, what you can do differently to better engage them. If you can’t see the entirety of your customer landscape, the way they live their lives, the gaps that exist beyond your current domain, your ability to evolve and innovate as a business is curtailed. All you can do is work out where to go from where you already are and how to better maintain your existing position, which is unlikely to yield groundbreaking results.
One of the ways this plays out is that the aim of being customer-centric and the use of data to achieve that goal combine to create significant problems for businesses. Think of it this way: with this mindset, the customer insight available to you will inherently focus on the way they interact with or experience your existing products and services. Take those automated customer surveys you receive by email after you’ve spent 45 minutes on the phone to a call center. Yes, the customer service rep may have been great and solved the problem for you, so you rate them highly against the questions asked in the survey, but the fact of the matter is you shouldn’t have to make the call in the first place.
Key KPIs like resolution and agent satisfaction are ticked off. Job done—the business has data telling them their customer service is 10 out of 10. But what they don’t know is how annoyed you are about having the product or service failure that meant you had to call them, or that you are thinking about leaving as a result. And even more importantly, what they never get is an understanding of how to better engage with you to turn that failure into an opportunity
Businesses that work within these limitations have no scope to evolve or improve because they don’t have the data that would allow them to think differently about their customers—or would allow them to innovate in ways that would improve their products, services and operational efficiencies; all the things that add customer value. Instead, the data they do have causes them to focus on incremental improvements in customer experience that are marginal to what customers really care about.
This combination of customer-centric and data-led approaches can narrow your vision as a business leader. The first can make you reactive rather than proactive, while the second overlooks what can’t be quantified.
Beware the ‘tyranny of data’
Overly data-led thinking inhibits business growth because it treats data as very black and white. If all the decisions you make are based on the data you have, where are you creating room in your decision-making for all those essential, invisible elements you don’t have data for? And if you can’t see them, how do you know what you’re looking for? Together, data led thinking and customer centric thinking create a perfect storm that’s wildly inhibiting for business growth.
The same is true where businesses are over-reliant on modelling competitors who are experiencing some success, or put too much faith in datasets that tell them about the market they operate in. This gives no insight into the nuance that differentiates one customer base from another, so you end up working within the limitations of your own partial data set, or the limitations of the wrong data set—and much like the customer-centric approach this is in danger of only giving you a partial view of your audience.
Imagination as the driver of innovation
You need imagination because innovation is nothing without imagination. If you look around you now, almost everything you see stemmed from someone’s imagination at some point in time. But innovation cannot be solely data-driven or purely imagination-led (with smart people in a meeting room dreaming up ideas and hoping one of them works). The real impact comes from combining these two approaches.
So, when we talk about ‘innovation,’ what we really mean is: how can we imagine a better future? And the kind of innovation that leads to a better business relies heavily on the interplay between imagination and data—with keen emphasis on the ‘play’.
Dare to play with the data
When we think of playtime, we think of children – who are unencumbered by datasets! They’re curious and exploratory; they have growth mindsets—and they also have something to teach us about learning to play with new ideas; to think differently in order to achieve different outcomes. But imagination without any data, however, poses a problem.
The aim is not to indulge in blue-sky-thinking without limitation but to apply a more imaginative approach to collecting those data sets. A strictly customer-centric approach may have you asking the right questions in the wrong way. Instead, can you collect the data in ways that give you opportunities to think differently about your business and your customers?
It does feel like a play of contradictions—data without imagination is prohibitive, imagination without data is little more than fantasy—but it’s also the recipe for business innovation and growth. You can take an imaginative approach to collecting the kind of data that helps you understand your customer, and you can use this customer understanding to make imaginative tweaks to the way you do business.
Ultimately, we can’t find tomorrow’s answers by asking today’s questions. A customer-centric approach may keep you grounded in today’s realities, but to transform business for the future we need to ask new questions; to think differently about a world that’s always changing. And when we dare to play with the data, to let customers inform business strategy, this is the most direct route to achieving continuous evolution and customer-driven success.
