There’s a reason fewer than 10% of us like change

Quick. Mention one industry that hasn’t been affected by technology. Just one!

Recently running this question through my mind, I figured I’d better turn to something totally basic, so much a part of our daily lives that we don’t normally give it a second thought. Toilets, I thought. I mean, a toilet is a toilet, right?

Well, it turns out that’s wrong. TOTO, headquartered in Japan, has migrated - just like Apple - from one core expertise to another. Their latest behind-the-scenes innovation is a toilet that samples the user’s feces and urine and sends the data for analysis on a daily basis. Not only does it catch potential life-threatening diseases, but the toilet (yes, the toilet!) analyses your immune system and creates daily recommendations for vitamin intake. Through a separate device, it will send this information to you each evening.

And that’s a loo!

What I’m saying is: We should expect change everywhere, in every industry, in every function and every job role. 

The best evidence for the constant nature of change, I think, is the churn rate of S&P companies. In 1964, the average tenure of companies on the S&P 500 was 33 years (according to Innosight, an analytic organization). By 1996, it was 24 years. By 2027, it's forecast to shrink to just 12 years. The same study predicts that at the current churn rate, half of S&P 500 companies will be replaced over the next ten years. 

You’ll be surprised to find out where the change gap is really happening… 

Working in the transformation of companies around the world, I’ve learned that change is a constant. But, even beyond this, I’ve learned that we fundamentally hate change. In my presentations, I sometimes ask, “Who likes change?” Seven out of ten participants raise their hands. But I don’t believe it. When push comes to shove, I’m convinced that fewer than 10% of us actually like change.

If we love change, wouldn’t the numbers have been dramatically different? So where’s the gap taking place? The answer is likely to surprise you. In my opinion, the gap isn’t necessarily a company’s ability to adopt new technologies — though that, for sure, would have an impact. The gap is increasingly taking place between the organization, its employees, and its customers. 

In the ‘good old days,’ customer needs were imbedded into every successful company’s very DNA - often because the founder, who had identified the opportunity in the market, was still around. 

Then, however, the essence of that culture, the tight connection between company and customers, would gradually crumble. It would be parked in some ‘customer research department’, often reporting to another function which, yet again, would report to someone else. Box ticked! We’re still listening to the customer, but the problem is, the functions who are doing the listening rarely have P&L responsibility. In the larger scheme of things, they lack internal respect.

Sure, they spit out one report out after another, PowerPoint presentations with one fancy graph after another. But over the years, attention to customer needs drowns in other priorities, meetings, and cost cutting. It ends up as a two-man show, located somewhere in the basement.

This company’s leaders answered one out of 10 questions correctly

Recently I went out into the field, aiming to detect how big the gap was between a major organization and its customers. The company, one of the world’s largest players in the food industry, had been suffering falling share prices. The crisis was well known; you could read about it in any publication that reported on the industry. The company understood that listening to the consumer would be a good idea.

After nearly three weeks in the field - talking, living, cooking, eating, and partying with the company’s past, current, and future customers - I cooked up (so to speak) a top-10 list of questions that would explore the world according to the customer.

1. When it comes to food, what is your customer’s #1 concern?
2. Among the following four words: organic, vegan, natural, tasty; which two do customers hate and which two do customers love?
3. What is the number #1 guilt factor preventing your customers from eating more of your product?

You get the point. I generated 10 straightforward questions. Anyone who truly knew the company’s customers should be able to answer every question in a heartbeat (just as I’m sure you could answer similar questions about your industry’s customers — right?).

The result? This company’s leaders answered one out of 10 questions correctly. Statistically, this is nearly impossible - even for an outsider, let alone a person who lives and breathes the industry.

We don’t really know our customers any more

When I showed them the results, they got it. We don’t really know our customers any more. The room was packed with white, middle-aged men (nothing against them, I’m one of them). Of course they saw the world from their own point-of-view. Yet the majority of their future customers would be women, in their twenties and often multi-racial. 

Change must be more than tweaking your pack design, launching a new app, updating the technology in your call-centre, or installing the latest SAP system (oh, my). From my point-of-view, that’s all veneer.

Change needs to go deeper. The folk in the room making the decisions need to change, and (as tricky as this might seem) these decision-makers need to spend quality time in the homes of their current and future customers.

Embedding insight into every corner of the organization is essential to successful change; it’s vital to measure how well leaders are listening and responding to customer needs. Change means rewarding people in the organization for cross-functional collaboration: No collaboration, no bonus.

Being busy creates an unexpected side-effect

But we’re lazy, because we’re busy. And the reason we’re busy? It’s because we’re serving ourselves - running meetings, producing endless decks, replying to our 300 emails, washing our hands of unpleasant issues, and assuming someone else will cover ‘that change part’ while we steer the ship.

Of course, the problem is that while we’re supposedly steering the ship, we have forgotten that we should be directed by those people paying our salaries: our consumers.

We’ve just forgotten it.

Martin Lindstrom is the founder and chairman of Lindstrom Company, the world’s leading brand & culture transformation group, operating across five continents and more than 30 countries. TIME Magazine has named Lindstrom one of the “World’s 100 Most Influential People.” Lindstrom is a high profile speaker and author of 7 New York Times best-selling books. His book Brand Sense was critically acclaimed by The Wall Street Journal as “one of the five best marketing books ever published,” Small Data was praised as “revolutionary” and TIME Magazine wrote this about Buyology: “a breakthrough in branding”. 

Watch this space for exciting pre-order packages for Lindstrom’s new book: The Ministry of Common Sense - coming soon!