You Can’t Optimise Yourself into Relevance
Some brands get it. Many don’t.
Consumers are longing to belong to something that means something to them.
We can’t optimise ourselves to relevance.
It’s a slow decay into the ordinary. What has broken loyalty and engagement isn’t poor service, bland advertising, or poor digital experiences.
Consumers have moved on.
‘Things’ are now ‘feelings’.
All generations think differently now; a pandemic, isolation, fear for the future and conflicts have touched everyone.
In combination, there has been an epoch-making shift in needs, wants, and priorities across almost everybody. Successfully answering those needs is what drives engagement. Customer, consumer, and citizen labels have merged as motivations, needs, purpose, authenticity, and social moves into the foreground. Optimising processes and fixing the broken are necessary, but they won’t fix engagement fundamentals.
Some brands get it. Many don’t.
So fix today if our brand needs to, but if our ambition is merely to deliver what consumers expect as table stakes, then we’re lost.