Feel the need for speed.

Success now is measured by speed - so what should you change to help your brand keep pace?

The rate of change is accelerating. The new innovation race driven by Gen AI is accelerating change, while simultaneously cultural tensions and political divisions and sustainability imperatives are increasing the volatility in our global systems, making change more dynamic and also more malleable.

At the same time, growth is stagnating as consumer categories are over supplied, developing markets growth is cooling off and the ecological agenda is focused on using less, not more.? In the midst of this, big corporations are looking sideways to grow, collapsing categories to gain market share by introducing new products and services into adjacent space against different sets of competitors. As this occurs, the only thing that matters to businesses is short-term growth driven by outperforming the speed to offer customer solutions.?

Nearly two years ago Accenture Interactive relaunched as Accenture Song - based on their research that there is “crisis of relevance” where they stated 95% of executives interviewed said “their customers are changing faster than they can keep up”. Accenture Song’s solution to this is called Life Centricity - “Life-centric businesses understand people in their full lives and adapt to evolving needs.”

With this in mind, I wanted to highlight the key behaviours critical to increasing organisational speed and relevance from my experiences of working with innovation and life centric businesses:

1. Strategy becomes a living eco-system, NOT a powerpoint deck

Often times strategies are actually just plans dressed up as strategies. While organisational blueprints are great for setting the direction and the intention, they don’t operate well when it comes down to how to execute. Doing the work to develop growth as a playbook for the business means you’re hardwiring the behaviour of changing into the way the company is run.?

Think about it most companies were established to do the same thing on repeat with slow and measured incremental change. They get really good at doing the same thing and optimising for it. But in a reality where change isn’t incremental or measured anymore, you need to rethink how you respond to moving quicker.

2. Decision making becomes the most valued agent for change

Too many companies don’t have a decisive culture. They may have a legacy culture of how it’s always been done, or a research culture, of what’s been heard and observed, or even a customer culture of what’s been bought and liked. But in each of these instances, decision making is reactive.?

Consulting firm, 麦肯锡 have a famous code called “The obligation to dissent”. It sets a duty of challenging convention in order to make better outcomes. Taking a mindset like this at an organisational level ensures that all staff thinking in terms of pro-actively better decision making.?

Now in the advent of Gen AI, the capabilities for greater data led intelligence means organisations are better equipped and pressured to make decisions based on continuous and ever improving analysis. But if the organisations leadership isn’t set up to be decisive, then they are acting to slow the business down.

The term institutional lag, is probably the biggest single competitor to a company’s growth, and ironically, it is a competitor from within the organisation.?

3. Speed becomes the core KPI

Just as Accenture Song set out its Life Centricity approach as the key to overcoming the ability for companies to keep up with changing customer demand - so the focus for measuring success on speed needs to be front and centre as the goal for success.

But how do you measure speed in an organisation? It’s not as easy as asking ‘how many good management decisions were made last month?’. It’s about establishing a synthesised view of business intelligence where you monitor and measure the impact of innovation and activity.?

Think of it like a GDP for the company - measured across a range of metrics. How actively are new initiatives driving market and revenue expansion for the company? How can you attribute innovation go-to-market rate, proposition adoption and supply-chain transformations into shifts in the performance of the business, for example.

It’s not about a silver bullet either, it’s about combined effect. The essence is to define your priorities for speed and put them front and centre in the boardroom. From decision making culture, to innovation processes, to go-to-market streamlining, to sales channels, marketing and operation efficiency rates.

In each instance, how are the individual elements of the business, increasing the speed at which the business is moving in line with change demand?

4. Marketing becomes the growth engine

In over two decades of working in marketing, I have found there are only two types of marketing. Marketing to influence sales and marketing to build demand. Naturally both are critical and we’re certainly witnessing the ‘AI-ification’ of sales focused marketing into an entirely automated function, but it’s worth also considering the power of marketing for building demand.

In under three years since launching, US EV automaker Rivian has gone from nothing to being voted the most loved car brand 2024 by Consumer Reports, beating BMW , Porsche AG and even Tesla .

While Rivian’s success is testimony to producing an excellent electric vehicle for a large category segment underserved by competitors. Rivian is also a success story based on brilliant brand building which began long before the first car rolled out of production. In fact Rivian was the 6th largest IPO in US history without even delivering a sale.

This example really serves to demonstrate the power of building demand. The story of Rivian, its founder RJ Scaringe, its high profile investors (Ford and Amazon) and its perfect fit for the aspirations of a generation of adventure seeking, environment conscious consumers. All these elements were woven together to tell the Rivian story in a way that harmonised to disproportionately accelerate its appeal and advocacy ahead of its rate of operation.?

What Rivian achieved is to increase the rate of demand so that the institutional pressure to evolve is reduced and more capable to manage along their own determined innovation curve.

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5. Categories becomes obsolete?

While historically we can view any given category as a where a few competitors lead and challenge each other to produce a distinct set of products or services, in recent years the advent of marketplace categories has seen an aggregation of categories collapsing into each other. Competitors from adjacent categories seek new growth by launching offerings to supply customers with previously unrelated products or services. Perhaps good examples here were Amazon moving into Video Streaming, or Uber moving into meal delivery. But there are even broader examples where brands have stretched themselves into unrelated categories based on their equity from another category. For instance it would sound unlikely for a vacuum cleaner brand to also be a highly desirable hair styling brand, but Dyson have proven it’s entirely possible.?

We’re now at a moment of peak category supply, where conceivably (and within reason) any brand could meet any consumer need. As this agnostic growth battle is raging with consumers, it’s also having a splintering effect on brands. It’s educating a new generation of consumers that brands no longer matter as a product, only as an experience of choosing, or fulfilling what is wanted. For example. consider how easy it is to forget which show you watch is streaming on which entertainment platform.?

Meanwhile, while this ‘decategorization’ effect lowers consumer preferences to brand provider, it also increases other consumers to value the niche and individual brands that only do one thing well. In many ways this emergent theme is a paradox - where we don’t care what comes from where, but we also care deeply that something is authentic and unique.?

The need for speed

It’s clear that for need for organisations to find ways to move faster is real - and that the fastest to move forward in generating demand will be the most successful.

What’s also clear from examples like Rivian, is that the ability to control your future in a fast moving world is as much about deep commitment to building demand via every internal and external point of impact as it is about having breadth of category offering.

The common thread across all the learnings in these points is that it starts from a leadership outlook set by the ambition to meet future demand. So the irony is that while speed is the only thing that may seem to matter. The ability to act with speed is determined by thinking further ahead.?

#brandstrategy #innovation #change #speed #growth #transformation #culture