How can you create a growth strategy where everyone wins?

In the latest EY Future Consumer Index survey, 68% of respondents think brands have a responsibility to invest in the sustainable production of their products and services. Further, 70% say that brands must be transparent about the social and environmental impacts of producing their products and services. As consumers begin to prioritize planet over affordability in their purchasing decisions, sustainable product and service innovation has shifted from first-mover advantage to baseline imperative for growth.

Chief marketing officers (CMOs) will want to collaborate with a much wider group of functional experts, from their chief experience officer (CXO) and chief innovations officer (CINO) to the chief commercial officer (CCO). Together, they will need to transform existing products and services to help ensure they are meeting existing and future consumer demand. The more acclimated C-suite executives are reaching beyond their comfort zones to continually disrupt themselves based on circular principles, the more they can drive their sustainable product and innovation agendas that lead to purposeful growth.

Four ways companies can drive sustainable innovation that is both planet and profit-friendly

Sustainability in product and service innovation is no longer aspirational, and it can’t be bolted on to innovation cycles after the fact. It’s essential that organizations think about and embed commercial, environmental and social sustainability into their purpose, design thinking, prototyping and scaling of every product and service.

Here are four ways to fuse planet with profit:

1. Stay in the problem longer than you feel comfortable. Companies are so used to rapid problem-solving that they’re not solving the issue behind the issue.

2. Make innovation a mindset. Innovation isn’t the responsibility of only one part of the business. Organizations need to create an innovation mindset across the entire enterprise.

3. Think backcasting rather than forecasting. A future-back approach to transformation can help companies unpack key megatrends, assess how they might shift market conditions and align these insights with the organization’s purpose.

4. Create your own competitor. Setting up a private company outside the structure of the incumbent company enables it to operate without legacy issues. It’s one of the biggest levers of innovation that most companies don’t use. 

Organizations need to align to their values and beliefs and show that in their actions. In building this trust, organizations need to know and engage with their customers as individual living, breathing human beings in ways they have yet to explore. And they have to deliver resonant experiences across every channel and platform consistently. In the latest EY Future Consumer Index survey, 62% of respondents say they would share personal data for a completely customized online experience.

The more organizations engage with the full spectrum of human needs (and not just “customer needs”), the more data they ethically collect and the more trust they gain from their customers, the better they can anticipate and improve the products and services they deliver to their customers, which leads to purposeful growth and long-term value creation.

By embedding customer centricity throughout the enterprise, organizations can make sure customer interactions are consistent, and the internal functions all have the same familiarity and understanding of their customers’ wants and desires. Moreover, they can provide a human-centered response through the customer lifecycle. CMOs have a huge opportunity to drive this collaboration throughout the organization so that the organization evolves and transforms in ways that both optimally serve the customer and improves the entire experience.

Five ways CMOs can speed into the future customer experience

Here are five ways CMOs can fast-track their way into the future customer experience — one that delivers on purpose and drives profit.

1. Talk to your customers regularly — and listen to what they say. Too often, CMOs believe they have understood their customers based on a point-in-time set of interactions rather than an ongoing dialogue. Regular one-on-one interactions help CMOs and their teams understand what resonates with customers, learn about the moments that matter and how to deliver better experiences in these moments.

2. Combine the qualitative with the quantitative. When customers trust, they are more inclined to provide more data. Harnessed properly, data and analytics can help CMOs get minutely granular in their segmentation — and take personalization to the next level without getting intrusive.

3. Design dynamic journeys with the tools for customers to create their own journeys. CMOs and other creative leaders will need to work together to design journeys that can flex and evolve with customers and give them the power to create their own journeys.

4. Flatten the silos. Silos create disconnects in data collection and analytics, segmenting customers and delivering personalized experiences that customers expect. Flattening the silos will enable CMOs and other customer-facing functions to deliver personalized experiences at every stage of the customer journey.

5. Focus on outcomes rather than activities. Today’s marketers still often focus too much on activities rather than outcomes. They incentivize and measure teams on how they perform a specific activity rather than how they arrive at the destination. CMOs need to shift the mindset of the organization to focus on the desired, consistent and organizationally aligned outcome, such as how workers contributed to making a customer’s life better, rather than how many widgets they designed, manufactured or sold. 

Most large organizations are designed according to 20th century principles. They were founded on rigid structures to organize people only. To operate at speed and scale today, companies need people plus technology. The last century’s operating principles also dictated the division into functional silos that create competition and disconnections at critical points along the customer value chain. Therefore, current operating models aren’t in any way designed with the customer in mind.

The truth is, customers don’t care how a company’s organization chart is structured, and their experiences transcend organizational silos. As such, business and operating models need to follow the customer lifecycle. This requires a complete rethink throughout the operating model. It needs to touch everything from processes to product innovation to pricing to sales and marketing. CMOs and other customer-facing leaders need to work with the C-suite to embed humanistic customer-centricity across all business areas and anchor it to business model reinvention.

They also need to move beyond score-dominant KPIs in favor of developing a clear approach for measuring the overall health of customer relationships as an intangible asset. Investments in customer relationships need to cascade across the organization. Customer experience is not another initiative; it’s a fundamental mindset and belief system. Measurements need to transcend the operating model as well.

Four concrete actions to build a successful customer-centric operating model

The road to building a customer-centric operating model is hard, which is one reason why so many business transformations fail. Based on EY experience helping clients successfully transform their operating models for customer-centricity, we’ve identified four key actions CMOs can take in partnership with the C-suite to turn their visions of customer-centricity into a reality:

1. Create pods that align to the customer lifecycle. Leaders of the pods will own all aspects of how to make the customer journey successful across the enterprise. For example, a bank may currently be organized by division (retail, commercial, business, wealth and asset management, etc.). Under a customer journey model, a pod may be dedicated to delivering all new customers a great welcome experience in their first six months, regardless of division or the product or service they have bought. The pod would then be incentivized to and measured against delivering the best possible customer outcomes rather than divisional or enterprise KPIs.

2. Master design thinking. Service design is a human-centered approach where designers consider the complex chains of interactions involved in innovating, producing and delivering a product or service. It takes a multidimensional view of how to meet customer needs, inclusive of every impacted role within the enterprise. It’s an approach that allows companies to engage in iterative product development, scale based on customer needs and invest based on a better appreciation of market size.

3. Give pods the data and empower them to make decisions. Modern organizations are putting anonymized or pseudo-anonymized data in the hands of pods and frontline, customer-facing employees. Because they are on the front lines, they can see how a product or service is performing. Companies need to allow these employees to make data-driven decisions to pivot or shift the direction of a product or service without intervention from core leadership.

4. Create an empathy mindset. Companies need to create a culture that prizes empathy. Empathy with the end customer enables pods to intensely channel personas, and optimize products and services for maximum customer engagement.