The life centricity playbook

Rather than relying on one-dimensional ideas of who customers are, life centricity requires seeing them in a new light. Oversimplifying people and ignoring the complexities that shape them leaves opportunities for value creation on the table.

A combination of human and machine intelligence is allowing us to understand the interplay between these roles and forces more deeply than ever before. Through artificial intelligence, analytics, ethnography, trend forecasting and deep qualitative and quantitative research, leaders are able to create more dynamic, expressive customer segments that can evolve as their customers do. This dynamic view allows them to spot proactive opportunities for growth.

As people are rethinking their sense of purpose, they expect businesses to align with their values and to address the bigger problems they see in their lives and the world at large. Companies that take a narrow view of their role in society and the marketplace miss the opportunity to provide solutions to unmet needs—and reap the resulting profits. Those that don’t broaden their mission around social, environmental, economic and other values put their relevance at risk.

In this new world, how you meet these needs is just as important as meeting them. As people—both in business and in their personal lives—come to grips with the finite amount of resources on earth, the innovators who can turn scarcity into abundance through technology and ingenuity will win the growth battle.

Companies often define themselves by their industry, drawing comparisons with peers pursuing similar goals or taking pride in being labeled an “industry leader.” But it might just be time to rethink industry limits.

Intelligence capabilities are broadening, allowing innovators to identify creative ways to apply technology and talent to solve new problems. Meanwhile, customers don’t see industry lines the same way companies do—and are increasingly giving brands permission to play different roles in their lives. Consider the case of ride-sharing apps that expanded from connecting people with cars to connecting them with scooters, motorbikes, bicycles, food deliveries, product orders and more. They saw themselves as competition not just for taxis, but for any point-to-point movement of people and goods.

By connecting their deeper understanding of customers’ lives to potential new uses for talent and technology, companies can expand beyond the boundaries of their traditional industry and into a broader ecosystem of meeting people’s needs. It’s not just a technology update; it’s an entire mindset makeover, one that brings creativity into the boardroom to seize opportunities for value creation, growth and relevance in the process.

Technology is often touted as a way to make things easier but as new tools, platforms and functionalities proliferate, and the lines between physical and digital worlds blur, it’s actually making customer experiences more challenging. Companies are adding tech that serves a specific silo, such as marketing or sales, but are failing to account for connections between those functions. This overcomplicates the experience for the user, without achieving the utility that the technology promises. We call this a “complexity tax.”

A life-centric approach aims to eliminate complexity tax by designing for simple but significant interactions across a unified experience continuum. To achieve it, all customer-facing functions (including product, marketing, commerce, sales and service) must be connected across a single data and experience platform. The full scope of the customer experience needs to be thoughtfully considered in a way that understands and responds to their needs in real time and draws actionable insights from those engagements.