What Near Future Need Should You Focus On?
Chapter Three: Principle 2—To Be Compelling Requires a Strategic Point of View
Dear Friends,
If you’ve been following along you know we’ve covered some important ground. But as we get closer to the end of this chapter you may be asking yourself, “how do I know what to build a point of view statement around?”
In this post, I try to answer that question. Please share with three people who need this post. If you use the share feature, we can send you some fun things for your time!
What Near Future Need Should You Focus On?
There are so many opportunities to think about the near future needs of your customers. The world is changing fast. The way we live, work, and create families is changing. There are constant pressures on consumers, and constant pressures on businesses.
Your job is not to respond to customer needs; it’s to anticipate them. Your job is not to design the ideal experience. The ideal never lasts. Your job is to ‘skate to where the puck will be.’ In the process of skating in the right direction, your customer’s experience will get better, as long as you can head in the right direction.
So how do you know what the right insight is to build your point of view statement around? The answer to that question, I think, looks like things coming together. The proper near future need that drives your point of view should be able to do the following:
Explain, at least partially, macro changes that are occurring in your industry, the world, or the customer’s world.
Be grounded in actual research conducted by the company of its customers.
Provide guidance to the company regarding the direction that needs to go.
In an earlier post, I wrote about the insight we uncovered in 2014 through research that there was something that comes after omnichannel strategy. I called it digital context. Today, Apple calls it ‘personal context.’ I shared with you the framework we built to describe how channel strategy would evolve. That insight looks and feels like macro events and company activity coming together.
What it doesn’t prescribe is an ideal design.
If you build your near future insight around an ideal design, you will lose the ability to adapt and evolve. You will become fixed on the ideal design and not on the near future need. Imagine for a second if Tim Cook had said that Apple was about the ‘ideal privacy experience’ and then went on to describe exactly what the ideal privacy experience looked like. He would have locked his company into a single solution to the problem.
Let the design of the experience evolve. You, as an experience strategist, must provide the insight and the guidelines, but you don’t need to design the solution in the point of view statement.
To find the insight, let me suggest some research methodologies that you are probably already very familiar with.
a. Ethnographic field research
b. Data analytics
c. Trend mapping
d. Scenario planning
Ethnographic field research
If you want to find something new, get out into the field and observe people. For all of the data that companies have, there is no substitute for spending time with customers. Doing field research on near future needs requires the ability to frame your research questions in ways that are future-oriented but open. You must learn how to bring your customer along a journey toward what comes next.
Data Analytics
To explore new insights and determine their value to your company, use data analytics. Most of what companies do with data analytics today is backwards. They spend far too much time profiling the customer and not nearly enough time trying to understand why important activities shift. Do you see a rise in interest in certain topics or solutions? Try to understand why. Do you see a drop off in usage of a key channel? Find out what’s behind that. Focus your data analytics on the data experience design model that I shared and you will be far more successful in establishing a powerful point of view.
Trend Mapping
Macro trends help you see how the world is shifting. In some cases, the macro trends are about society and consumption. But just as important for most companies are the macro trends within your business models. Think about ‘subscription’ as a business model macro trend, or SAAS. You need the ability to project forward and imagine what the future marketplace is likely to look like. You need to map your capabilities to your projections of the future and see how the insight you’ve gained helps you explain what will happen.
Scenario Planning
If there is one of these capabilities that most experience strategists don’t do well—or at all—it’s scenario planning. Yet scenario planning is extremely important to business strategy. You can use the insight you’ve uncovered through other methodologies to do scenario planning activities that involve your team, your partners, your distributors, and—very often—with your customers.
Part of the reason why scenario planning isn’t used as often by experience strategists is historical. Before design thinking, scenario planning was the primary way that companies built business strategies. Think, SWOT analysis. Think, barriers to entry. Rarely did companies include insights from customers in their scenario planning activities. When design thinkers, assisted by Clayton Christensen and others, demonstrated that the ‘puck’ was actually the customer’s need—not the company’s profitability—scenario planning fell out of favor.
But risks, threats, seismic shifts, and uncertainty didn’t go away.
Experience strategists need to develop their skills in scenario planning, especially as they develop their point of view statement for their company. It’s important for the company, but its also important for the customer. If you are going to focus on the near future needs of customers, you need to address customer uncertainty. Your customer is just as uncertain about their future as your company is about its future. That’s why they worry.
By keeping an eye on the shifting landscape for them and your customer, you calm everyone’s fears. And encourage positive risk-taking.
You will notice that surveying your customers is not on my list of things to do to help you identify your insight. Most companies use survey data as a security blanket. They input into the survey questions that fit their frame of reference, their history, and their perceived risks. They give far too much weight to the results. There is something about a bar chart that evokes certainty. And there is something about a questionnaire that causes the respondent and the reader to stop entertaining alternatives.
I like surveying people once I have the insight so that I can discover where the customer is in their journey toward the same insight. I also think surveys help companies understand the size or scope of the opportunity. But they are only one input.
A Few Points of View Insights In This Book
If you are feeling a bit uncertain about what a point of view might look like for your company, fear not! In the second half of the book, each chapter is a fully researched, fully framed point of view that you can use as a foundation for your work. Here’s the chapter topics:
Chapter Six: Leveraging Experience Strategy into the Future
How is customer behavior changing and what can be done to ‘win’ through experience strategy?
a) Customers, as influenced by the situations in which they make decisions, are changing preferences and behaviors.
b) Four Points of View (POVs) on the critical shifts that merit attention (moments to modes; journeys to life systems; smart to genius; channels to context)
c) Research-based strategies and frameworks to thrive.
Chapter Seven: POV 1—From Moments to Modes
Experience strategists focus on moments, but people get into modes
a) POV: As technology progresses, people get into more modes
b) There is more time value in modes
c) Stories and examples of modes
d) Modes explain situations and provide context
e) How people experience modes
f) How companies can support modes
Chapter Eight: POV 2—From Journeys to Life Systems
Meaningful experiences come from the systems people create for their lives
a) POV: People today create systems for their lives. Companies who understand those systems can get the whole job done, understand situations, and be meaningful.
b) What journey maps don’t do
c) Stories and examples of people’s life systems
d) Insights by industry
e) Life systems and modes work hand in hand
f) Implications for business models
Chapter Nine: POV 3—From Smart to Genius
Even smart solutions can degenerate into stupid experiences
a) The impact of intelligence on solutioning
b) The evolution of the automobile
c) What is smart
d) What is genius
e) What is dumb
f) What is stupid
g) How to talk to customers about AI
h) Genius platforms create superpowers
i) How to do data experience design
j) How to do situational analytics
Chapter Ten: POV 4—From Channels to Context
Customers don’t ask for seamless channels, they want you to understand context
a) POV: As more channels become smart, they create a ‘personal data ecosphere’ for the customer. Companies need to understand digital context to support customers.
b) The Netflix Problem: Greater personalization does not lead to better recommendations.
c) The contextual consumer. Why people share data with companies
d) The personal data ecosphere
e) New business models: B2I2C and C2I2B
f) The four principles of experience strategy create trust
g) Context roadmapping and modeling
Chapter 11: From Experience to Transformation Strategy
a) This chapter focuses on what comes after the Experience Economy and how strategy will need change in the future.
I can’t wait to share these chapters with you. I love your feedback, so please take a little time to comment on the posts!