Editorial
The Gist
- Remember customers are complex beings. To understand consumer needs, brands must recognize that customer interests aren’t always black and white.
- Use consumer contradiction to thrive. A life-centric approach helps you use the nuance of customer interest to achieve business success.
- Know what’s influencing people. Keeping on the pulse of the latest trends allows you to respond to customer preference changes.
Brand relevance is a constantly-moving target that CX and marketing professionals never stop chasing. For years, many leaders (including myself) have pursued a customer-centric approach to deliver great experiences and earn loyalty.
Although I don’t think this is fundamentally incorrect, I do believe we should broaden our understanding of customers and reframe the best practices needed to stay connected with them.
Your Customers Are Not One-Dimensional
It’s high time that businesses realize customers aren’t one-dimensional. They are humans just like us, balancing priorities and navigating a world filled with different forces and influences. For too long, customer-centricity has relied on the oversimplification of customer needs and boxing them into neat little segments. This doesn’t always work because customer needs are fluid — and sometimes even contradictory — which makes building static customer segments that accurately reflect preferences difficult.
For example, a customer might prioritize speed and efficiency when they’re grabbing coffee and a bagel on the way to work, and then seek ambiance and relaxation when going to a café for lunch with friends. This demonstrates how the customer seeks similar products with a completely different set of priorities.
Customers might also find themself needing to balance priorities that are in direct conflict, such as supporting local businesses with a weekly trip to the farmers market while regularly turning to the ease and convenience of Amazon delivery. It’s foolhardy to assume that people have a binary mindset or always value the same things. The modern customer’s life is filled with paradoxes and contradictions, with which they are content. In a 2022 Accenture study of 25,000 global consumers, 70% of respondents believed behaving inconsistently was completely acceptable and very human.
Rather than pursuing models that aim to predict how consumer groups always behave based on some demographic profile — something which is clearly unattainable — let’s understand the life forces that might trigger different responses. That’s where life-centricity comes into play.
Related Article: Customer Journey Analytics Basics for Better CX
Achieve Customer-Centricity Through Life-Centricity
Life-centricity is about reorienting the way we think about what influences customers. It requires us to zoom out, understand the world people live in and how situations or events might influence everyday choices. It also requires us to accept customers as complex beings who are often faced with competing objectives. Paradox is the new status quo and contradiction is the new normal.
As mentioned at the outset, a life-centric approach doesn’t mean we should forget everything we thought we knew about customer-centricity. Instead, we can use life-centricity as a way to build on how we understand customers. Here are some suggestions for how teams can integrate this type of approach into the work they're already doing.
Reinvent Customer Segments and Personas
Teams should evolve segments and personas to reflect the life forces that are most prevalent in different customer groups. Instead of starting with demographics, anchor segments with the jobs to be done and their underlying needs. This method encourages us to begin by thinking about a customer’s needs and what they are trying to achieve.
From there, we can incorporate goals, values, pressures and influencing life factors. Emphasize areas of psychographic conflict and contradiction to make this approach fresh and relevant.
That being said, it’s still OK to incorporate demographics to help bring segments and personas to life. Just be wary of putting people in boxes based on age, gender, etc.
Related Article: Personalization and Segmentation: How They're Different and Why It Matters
Get a Handle on Influencing Factors on Customer Behavior
Classic customer-centricity tells us that we need to keep a pulse on customer preferences and behavior, then respond to changes. But what if we could get ahead of the curve to anticipate change? If organizations stay deeply connected to the influences of customers' lives, they can be proactive.
For example, when employers demanded their workers to return to the office post-pandemic, it significantly impacted people’s daily routines. This, in turn, influenced their choices. More time in transit might have catalyzed some consumers to prioritize convenience, or the extra expense associated with commuting might have resulted in cutbacks to spending elsewhere.
Businesses keeping tabs on these influencing factors would’ve been able to anticipate shifts in needs and respond dynamically to avoid losing customers amid changing priorities. This is paramount to success, as 64% of consumers wished companies would respond faster to their changing needs.
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Bring Systems Thinking Into UX and CX Design
When solving today’s problems, brands need to solve for shifting scenarios. Teams can think wider when designing experiences and customer journeys — today’s hot product might be irrelevant tomorrow if they’re too rigid and can’t flex when global events happen or interests change.
Systems Thinking, which can be integrated into popular design thinking methodologies, pushes us to consider the interconnectedness of related problems and underlying causes.
Even with these solutions, the moral of the story is that times are changing…fast. Businesses that wait to see the ripple-effect of impact may be too late to respond and lose relevance with customers. Life-centricity doesn’t erase what we thought we knew about customer-centricity. It’s simply a change in the altitude at which we seek to understand customers and their complex lives.
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