Consumers want what!?!
The customer experience is the next competitive battleground. ~ Jerry Gregoire
It’s mid-February and a good time to start thinking about how your company will approach 2021. Why mid-February you ask? If you’re working in a large company, you have finished your annual planning cycle for 2021, so now it’s time to get to work. And, if you’re in a mid-size company, you’ve probably finished closing the books and getting everything to your accountant in order to pay your taxes for last year.
Let’s get started by looking at what your customers really want. After 11 months of pandemic lockdown, they crave products that deliver novelty and fun. So says Northwestern University Business School lecturer Paul Earle Jr. and editor Fred Schmalz.
“The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 and ’19 was followed by the roaring twenties,” he says. “I think we’re going to see, again, a massive appetite for new experiences, for things that are fun, that are social, that bring us together,” said Schmalz. He pointed to three predictions for 2021.
1 – Consumers will want to expand beyond the staples
Let’s face it, the initial fear of the pandemic caused all of us to load up on household staples (remember the great toilet paper shortage?). But as anxieties ebb, and vaccinated population grows, Earle sees our appetite for new products, new ideas, new designs, new foods growing. “Retailers need to start offering a wider selection to bring news and excitement to all of their different product categories,” he says. “‘Same old, same old’ is a bad strategy.”
2 – We will see a trend towards kindness
Regardless of how this would impact our businesses, I really want this prediction to come true. Consider the run on holiday lights and Christmas trees that occurred this year, as customers stayed close to home and wanted to do something to cheer up their families and friends. In Chicago, for instance, some neighborhoods banded together to decorate entire blocks with holiday arches. Earle warns against dismissing this urge toward kindness as an empty warm-and-fuzzy gesture. He views it, rather, as a growth area that companies should keep in mind when designing new products and services.
Earle cited a simple, yet elegant example when they ordered a pizza from Domino’s. The delivery person popped out a small cardboard platform to rest the pizza next to the front door, so it didn’t get cold on the porch.
3- New problems will require new solutions.
Finally, Earle predicts that the rapid innovation in how companies work and connect with customers will continue. “Most innovations were created to solve a problem, oftentimes one experienced personally by the founder,” Earle says. “People face a lot of problems right now, which will lead to a lot of solutions.”
In industries like sports and live events, companies are having to innovate as they start to bring fans back. Even when the vaccine is more readily available in the U.S., there will still be myriad safety concerns that come along with gatherings. “Think about Wrigley Field,” Earle says. “The Cubs want to get people back without disrupting traffic flow too much. So, they’ll design rapid temperature checks for fans on their way in. And there are now technologies to use drones to fly through all the seats and disinfect them before people arrive.”
There’s one area that I do want to draw your attention to. Over the past several years, we have seen social media rapidly grow, both in size and power. Their ability to drive opinion is becoming both obvious and worrisome. This has created new friction points, and probably the most obvious is between Facebook and Apple. Over the next three months, with the newest version of operating system for iPhones, it is set to explode.
From MacRumors, “Apple and Facebook have been in a very public spat over the course of the last few months as Apple dials up its pro-privacy stance. The two companies have long had tension, more recently however Facebook is taking shots at an upcoming iOS and iPadOS feature that will require apps and data companies such as Facebook to ask for users' permission before tracking them across other sites and websites.”
From the Wall Street Journal, “At stake is how the internet will evolve and which companies will dominate it. Facebook and Apple’s visions are diverging and increasingly incompatible. Facebook wants to capture and monetize eyeballs on every possible device and platform. Apple wants to draw users to its own hardware-centric universe, partly by marketing itself as a privacy-focused company. The outcome of the battle could affect what kinds of information users see when they browse the internet.”
I don’t know who will win this battle of the giants, but it’s best to get out of the way when elephants dance. Privacy is important to a growing segment of your customer base. EU and California digital privacy laws will probably lead to a federal legislative solution within the next two years.
Business leaders need to understand exactly how their companies collect and use customer data. More importantly, they need to be able to articulate it when asked… And, that question could come from consumer, regulators, or legislators.
If you have questions, or need some help… Call us.