Sherpa Blog: The search for growth

I blame Tony Blair.

Ever since his “education, education, education” speech, there’s been a trend for politicians to announce they have three priorities and then just say the same thing three times.

“Growth, growth, growth” is the latest variation on this theme, courtesy of new Prime Minister, Liz Truss.

To be fair to the PM, it’s a mantra which is very much in tune with the times. While there’s not a lot of agreement on how best to achieve it, no one would deny that growth is suddenly having a moment.

And it’s not just politicians – everyone’s at it.

Last month saw Elon Musk explaining how he intends to “go for growth” at Twitter, quadrupling user numbers while quintupling revenue. Next came Netflix, announcing their plan to “return subscription volumes to a growth trajectory” by launching a new service featuring ads. Meanwhile, poor Mark Zuckerberg has had to apologise to shareholders for what looks like the end of Facebook’s 18-year run of uninterrupted audience growth.

So, it seems we’re all obsessed with growth right now. And it’s probably no coincidence that, at the exact moment we’re hearing so much about it, the stuff itself is becoming harder than ever to come by.

You don’t need to be a macroeconomist to see that the headwinds facing business are strengthening. As UK plc enters a period of uncertainty, the wider outlook is one of rising costs and weakening demand.? In the words of Kwasi Kwarteng (remember him?), “it’s a very dicey situation globally”.

In this context, growth, while still possible, is likely to become much more of a zero-sum game. Which is to say, winning will increasingly come at the expense of others losing. With households tightening their belts, the fight for share will play out as a battle between competing customer value propositions. Those businesses which succeed in the next few years will be the ones with the most compelling consumer offerings, the ones best able to understand and meet the needs of their target audiences.

It’s something we’ve been hearing about for many years, but all of a sudden the change is on us: customer centricity is the new battleground of competitive advantage – and increasingly the only route to growth.

At Insight Sherpas, we’ve been helping businesses get ahead of this trend for some time, by designing and implementing customer closeness programmes.

These are programmes which help colleagues experience what it’s like to be a customer, not just hear about it. The aim is to get as many people as possible in an organisation to develop an intuitive grasp of who their audiences are and what they want, so that insight-led decision making becomes almost second nature. Ultimately, the objective is to help businesses better attract, engage and retain customers, and grow revenue.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? And to an extent it is, at least in theory, but the practicalities of designing and implementing a closeness programme that delivers a return on investment can be complicated, with any number of bear traps lying in wait for the uninitiated. Anyone can set up live focus groups and retail safaris – the trick is making sure they drive action.

We’ve identified a set of ‘golden rules’ which we believe it’s essential to follow if you’re looking to build your own customer closeness programme. Click here to learn more about the rules, and please give us a call if you would like to explore potential options for your own business.

Alternatively, just channel your inner Tony Blair and fall back on the three Cs: “closeness, closeness, closeness”.