The New Strategy Skill: Identifying Situational Growth Markets
Chapter 2: Principle 1 - Growth comes by Capturing Situational Markets
Dear Friends,
Today is final installment in chapter 2, which is just under 50 pages long. Thanks for reading and sharing these posts. The writing at times was a bit rugged. The thinking may have not always made sense, especially if you didn’t read all of the posts, but I do feel like I was able to articulate fully the parameters of this new way of doing strategy.
Remember, the chapter outlines are at the bottom of the post. Have a great weekend!
The New Strategy Skill: Identifying Situational Growth Markets
The timing is right for people who create strategies for customers to retool. A post pandemic world where companies are rethinking their business models and retooling for a new generation of AI-enabled super consumers is the right time. Experience strategists, researchers, and designers changed business forever. We were the ones who drove customer-centricity. We came up with the frameworks that pushed companies to think about people as people (empathy) to ask people what they thought of their recent experience (CX) and we are the ones who introduced the tools that saved companies from multi-channel delivery chaos. We invented the journey map. We developed disciplinary excellence in UX, service design, design thinking, co-creation, and sprints.
We have much to be proud of. We cannot rest on our laurels. We did not get everything right.
In the near future—actually right now—companies will need experience strategists who know how to identify situational markets, how to grow those markets, and how to anticipate the changes that will occur in people’s lives that the company should pay attention to. No doubt that the vast analytical capabilities of generative AI will assist, but companies need people who can work in cross-disciplinary teams to build the models and tools necessary for growth.
Just as writers, photographers, and editors had to adapt to the systemic changes of social technology, so also will experience strategists need to recognize that everything—and I mean everything—is dynamic, ongoing, and evolving. Customer-centered companies need experience strategist who can create the frameworks and capabilities to thrive in a dynamic business environment.
The new strategy skill of identifying situational growth markets should at least include the following:
The ability to use contextual data likely to be present in a situation: Location, weather, queue, sequence, relationship, content, biometric, and on and on.
The ability to frame for the company the personal data ecosystem of the typical customer. What tools, data types, and other elements should your company to support to assist the customer?
Expertise in how to deploy situational segmentation so that you can identify the most important situational markets and what people will want from them. If you are a cake maker is it when the customer is having a birthday on vacation or when they are on a business trip?
A process for assessing, discovering, and defining situational markets. Expertise in how to prioritize situational markets, size them, align them to jobs to be done, and leverage insights about them.
The ability to bridge organizational silos and bring people together around a common understanding of the challenge. Certainly, creating when statements that are empathetic and strategic will help. But there’s more to do.
The ability to guide the customization models that will define situational customization. An understanding of how controls support the customer and lead to specific customizations.
A point of view on data experience design, which is fundamental to executing against situational markets.
None of this is impossible. But all of it will be a stretch for experience teams. Be ready to abandon cherished beliefs about your customers. Be ready to defend situational markets to skeptical colleagues. And, I think, be willing to move quickly but patiently.
Situational markets are real. They are far more useful than persona-based market segments for companies who want to grow. There are endless opportunities for companies but you can’t see them unless you change your mindset.
The situational market mindset will help your business model adapt to the modular, systemic, ever evolving world of your customers. Your customers will feel the value and in return they will spend more time with you and your solutions.
Click here for book outline with links to posts
This post about Experience Strategy Certification is also helpful.