The impact of Covid-19 has forced businesses to reinvent their business models and significantly accelerated technology adoption to enable workforce and stay relevant in a world of remote everything. Digital transformation has emerged as the key agenda for brands in every industry to ensure sustainable growth.
With the world accelerating rapidly towards everything connected, everything remote, the 2021 is an opportunity to approach markets with new intent. To stay alive, stay ahead, and stay competitive in this new economic environment, businesses need to rethink their strategy and adopt new practices to ensure sustainable growth.
Purpose-driven sustainable growth
Customers view purpose-driven brands as being more caring and, as a result, are 4-6x more likely to buy and remain loyal. Yet, there is a gap between what business leaders believe their brand purpose to be and what their behaviors suggest their purpose truly is.
In 2021, companies need to revisit their brand strategy and activate their brand purpose to stay close and relevant to their communities. It can shine a light on a business’ transformation path and ensures sustainable growth.
Speed matters
COVID-19 has stress-tested bsinssess to the point of breaking the way they work, pushing them to adopt new business operation models at speed. Traditional management focused hierarchies are being replaced by new agile structures that empower decision-making at all levels, increasing the enterprise ability to perform better at scale and with speed.
To ensure fast and sustainable growth, businesses need to look beyond their current models to transform by creating new paradigms and alliances for flexibility and agility. PepsiCo did the same during pandemic, by launching two direct-to-consumer (D2C) websites with less than 30 days from concept to execution to enable fast and easy access to their products.
Digital commerce
COVID-19 has accelerated years of e-commerce growth in a few weeks, putting digital commerce sales at an all-time high. Although, total global retail sales declined 3.0% – retail e-commerce sales grew 27.6% in 2020 after being projected to decline 16.5% mid-pandemic. With 14.3% projected growth in 2021, e-commerce will continue to be crucial for brands and retailers even if the pandemic subsides. The number of online shoppers will only continue to rise, with eMarketer projecting that 150 million more people became online shoppers in 2020 compared to 2019.
To capitalize on this upward e-commerce trend, businesses need to accelerate and optimize digital commerce channels. As online shoppers demand speed and efficiency, customer experience becomes an imperative to overcome the competition.
Experiment more and often
There is no innovation without experimentation. For business transformation it is critical to develop a culture of experimentation and it starts by using data for iterative experimentation.
Leading companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft have all incorporated the culture of experimentation to successfully innovate and offer better customer experiences and services. In words of Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO Amazon – Failure and innovation are inseparable twins.
Test small in low-stakes environments; run number of different experiments (like A/B test); allow managers to share experiments across business divisions and welcome scrutiny from the everyone; give yourself plenty of time and don’t rush experiments; and make sure managers don’t have incentive to hack results – see what works and what doesn’t, with an end goal of rolling out new products, improving customer experiences and developing new business models.
Data transparency
Customer data transparency and privacy has become one of the key elements of customer engagement. It is expected that the total amount of data created, captured and consumed globally will be more than double by 2024.
Many businesses today tend to be opaque about the customer data they collect and often resell, which leaves their customers feeling uneasy. Though such practice may give business an edge in the short term, in the long run this undermines consumers’ trust, which in turn hurts competitiveness.
Businesses must have an extensive and transparent privacy policy that clearly defines what information they collect, how it is stored and protected, and why and how it is used. Customer-centric approaches that are clear and give user the control over their personal data, will define customer experience and personalization in the future.
Today, as we recover from the pandemic, re-think and re-invent your business for future. The seamless transition to a new normal will depend on how rapidly organizations adopt new ways to do business, new technologies and new innovation.
Please reach out if you have thoughts to share.
About the Author: Bhasker Thapan
Re-imagining businesses through experiences
We are a full-service digital agency with leading capabilities across digital – from web design to development, branding to marketing, cloud transformation to security. We create human-centered and future proof experiences – enabling transformation, ensuring sustainable growth.