In brief
- Consumer behavior is changing faster than businesses can keep up. Digital transformation can help them keep pace—but not get ahead.
- Companies must go from product- or customer-centric strategies to a life-centric approach in order to achieve growth through relevance.
- To move toward life centricity, executives need to see their customers as multifaceted and understand the complex external forces that impact them.
- Our five key plays can help leaders develop a life-centric strategy and create momentum for the future.
of executives believe digital transformation efforts are helping them stay afloat, but aren’t driving new growth.
When the growing gets tough…
C-suite executives agree: It has never been more challenging to achieve meaningful growth.
After years of global volatility, companies need new strategies to thrive amid the upheaval. Meanwhile, people are becoming increasingly unpredictable as economic, social, environmental and political forces push them to continuously reassess their values and decisions.
Amid these ongoing challenges, we surveyed 1,700 global C-suite leaders over the course of two rounds. What we learned underlines the key issue of today: In our most recent survey, 95% of both B2C and B2B executives told us that they believe their customers are changing faster than they can change their businesses. That's up from 88% of executives just a few months prior.
Many are turning to technology to reshape their operations, but finding it isn’t enough: Though nearly all executives are accelerating their digital transformations, an astounding 97% acknowledge that, at best, such efforts merely allow them to keep pace, not fuel new growth.
Within our research, however, we discovered a ray of light: Some companies are beginning to break out. The highest growth companies in our study are widening their strategic aperture, transforming in ways that position them to drive new growth and relevance. They’re using technology more creatively to solve emerging customer needs. Most importantly, our analysis found that companies gaining momentum are not using strategies that are product-centric, or customer-centric—they are becoming life-centric.
In our previous report, we explained how customer behavior is changing—and why it seems paradoxical.
The way forward:
A life-centric approach
Businesses today need to take a broader view that allows them to see customers in their full lives and adapt to their ever-changing needs and priorities. We call this life centricity.
A life-centric approach is built on understanding that people are multifaceted, and that they embrace their own complexity. It involves keeping a finger on the pulse of the external forces that impact modern life (whether economic, social, cultural or beyond) and finding ways to respond that create value for all. Companies with life-centric strategies are willing to make bold, creative changes to the heart of what they do, whether that means upending business models and internal operations or reimagining who their customers are.
Our research has found that businesses focused on life centricity are best positioned to maintain their relevance and thrive. They are three times more likely to outperform their peers on speed-to-market and almost five times more likely to outperform on customer lifetime value.
They’re also positioned to jump to the front of the growth race: Our modelling analysis predicts that companies who lead in life centricity will outpace the growth rate of their lagging peers by nine percentage points annually. For a $10 billion company, that could mean a difference of growing $4 billion in new annual revenues over five years—or shrinking by $1 billion in the same period.
Life-centric fundamentals
See customers in their full life
Solve for shifting scenarios
Simplify for relevance
Instead of …
Using old segmentation strategies to force customers into tidy, predictable categories
Taking a static, one-size-fits-all approach
Trying to do everything at every moment
New strategy …
Unbox them by seeing them and the life forces the impact them more holistically
Adapt to customers’ changing priorities with creative solutions
Use tech-enabled insights to make customers’ lives easier and internal operations more fluid
5 life-centric plays to drive growth
Through analysis, we have identified five distinct and empirically-proven ways that companies on the path toward life centricity are capturing growth amid uncertainty. Each of these life-centric plays can be used on its own but has compounding effects if combined with the others.
Play #1
Gain a profound understanding of people
Play #1
Gain a profound understanding of people
From:
Seeing customers as “buyers” with static personas
To:
Seeing customers as multi-dimensional through dynamic data
Growth potential:
16%
more likely to achieve highest levels of
profitability growth
19%
more likely to achieve highest levels of
employee retention
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.

Harvard Business Review: Keeping up with customers’ increasingly dynamic needs
Accenture Song’s David Droga and Baiju Shah explain how a move from customer centricity to life centricity can unlock the next great wave of growth.
READ MOREPlay #2
Broaden your canvas for value creation
Play #2
Broaden your canvas for value creation
From:
A focus on financial value while meeting existing needs
To:
A focus on sustainable growth through solving unmet needs and providing broader value
Growth potential:
26%
more likely to achieve the highest levels of market share growth
19%
more likely to achieve the highest levels of customer lifetime value
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.
Play #3
Creatively transcend industry norms
Play #3
Creatively transcend industry norms
From:
Extracting incremental growth from existing technology and talent
To:
Driving exponential growth through creative applications of technology and talent
Growth potential:
32%
more likely to achieve the highest levels of revenue growth from new ventures
29%
more likely to achieve the highest levels of speed-to-market
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.
Play #4
Design a delightful experience continuum
Play #4
Design a delightful experience continuum
From:
Overcomplicated, under-performing experiences that fail to satisfy customers
To:
Thoughtful connectivity across all customer-facing functions for a simpler, engaging experience
Growth potential:
26%
more likely to achieve the highest levels of customer satisfaction
26%
more likely to achieve the highest levels of speed-to-market
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.