Strategy

Over the last decade, most companies have realized the need to become customer-centric. And yet, very few actually are. Customer centricity isn’t just about digital tools to improve customer service. It’s a strategy and a culture: a way to differentiate and a way to make better decisions faster.

Business leaders must understand what their stakeholders’ behaviors will look like after the pandemic. Drawing on research into habit formation, technology adoption and behavioral economics, leaders can make reasonable predictions to unlock a new era of growth.

Innovation is one thing; success in the marketplace, quite another. Alonzo Canada, Pete Mortensen, and Dev Patnaik offer a framework in which design becomes the channel for uniting these two realities.

In marketing and branding, the mantra of the development process is “respond to customer needs.” But as Dev Patnaik makes clear, not all needs are created equal. Here, supported by examples and case studies, he describes a hierarchy of customer needs and suggests how corporations can use this design-based analysis-system logics-to inform their strategic and tactical decision making.

There’s a slew of data out there to measure innovation, but it’s crucial to tailor performance metrics to specific goals and people.

Those who are struggling to deal with ambiguity can learn a lot from organizations that seem to thrive in uncertain environments.