winning the race for retail relevance
9th April 2025
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Speech Summary
2025 welcomes the birth of the Beta generation, resulting in seven different consumer demographics to serve. From Traditionalists (born after WWII) and Baby Boomers, all the way through to Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha and on to the Beta babies of today, retailers face a more complex task in meeting consumer needs.
Change in all forms presses down on every industry and the demands placed on the retail industry are no exception. Change comes at us as Technological, Economic, Social, Regulatory and most critically from shopper expectations themselves.
To survive (and thrive) every brand needs to exert a greater force against these changes, otherwise we will be crushed by them. To survive and ensure our businesses are future focused, we need to have the courage to embrace new directions. We need to collaborate and have an excellence in execution to have better connections with our customers, beyond product.
It would be arrogant of us to assume that we can continue to run our business the same way over the next 10 years as we have over the past 10, as arrogant as Kodak thinking digital photography would be a fad, or Nokia feeling their scale would protect them against the iPhone. Arrogance kills entire brands and industries, and it could kill your business faster than you think. As our retail customer expectations change, alongside our business landscape, so must we.
Staying relevant is key to survival and so we aim to focus on what our customers value. It is in exploring and understanding the values of the modern customer connection, we can build a business for future success.
Take your eye off what your customers value and you run the risk of becoming irrelevant.We discussed four key values during the keynote.
Blue Dot Centricity
We need to place our customer at the centre, not our brand, product, manufacturing capabilities or our own ways of working. The customer is not some inconvenient truth at the end of a customer journey. They are the BLUE DOT – the pulsing centre point around which everything must revolve.
Everything comes to the customer today. Why go to a restaurant when Grub Hub will deliver to your home? Why go out on the streets to flag a cab when Uber will deliver on to your door? Why use an expensive orthodontist when you can straighten your teeth with mail-order clear braces? Customer expectations have changed. As an industry and business, many have been process or manufacturing centric for too long. We need to shift from a product to a solution focus with our customers.
Carrying the Blue Dot metaphor farther, no one would open Google maps and follow someone else’s blue dot on the map – you are only shown your own. The modern customer expects to be treated personally; made feel special, have heavily customised service at every touch point.
Sometimes we utilise technology to do this at scale. Every time I arrive at the airport car park, the barrier reads my vehicle registration, the barrier automatically lifts, and my visit is auto-charged to my credit card as the WELCOME KEN message appears on the ticket terminal. No matter how many times I do this, I feel like James Bond. I feel recognised.
Make them feel special by connecting personally with them. Move away from commodity product solutions. Use data to better leverage that connection.Think about how the business can better connect with your customer in a way that makes them feel like they are at the centre, beyond product. Think about how we can help retailers better connect and put the shopper at the centre in-store.
Expectant
Customers expect it to be right, first time, every time. There is no room for inconsistencies in how a customer is treated today. Ultimately Customer Experience has become the battle ground for success, and in that reality, we need to strive for better.
No longer is a customer delighted with expected levels of product or service. You must push past satisfaction and expectations into the ‘excite & delight’ space if you are to cut through with today’s consumer. The store experience needs to be something worth sharing amongst peers, an experience. They rightfully demand more from every brand or retail experience they invite into their lives, and we need to honour that invitation.
Recall that diving board analogy – your customer is at the very top in terms of their expectations of you. They want it, and they want it NOW, and they want it about them, particularly relevant in an otherwise commodity retail experience.
Think about how to delight your customer in unexpected ways. Brands need to connect beyond mere product functionality. It is only through going beyond expectations that we build brand advocacy and tribal belonging, an empowered customer. You need to be different from others in your industry, specifically in how we emotively connect with customers and step into the solution space with them..
Remember those Harley Davidson and Red Bull tattoos – that is what we all want. An empowered consumer who will go out and sell your business for you. We all need a Swiftie army.
The brands that invest in CX and strive to go beyond any and every customer expectation lay down the foundations for Customer Lifetime Value, true of both the B2B and B2C worlds.
Phygital
We now live in a ‘Digital First World’ – a world where we all reach for our digital devices first to answer any question or solve any problem. The digital Immersion is only going to increase as the coming reality fuelled by AI, Quantum and Robotics converge alongside customer expectations. The retail experience, and indeed society as a whole, will never be the same again.
Every brand proposition has to be part Physical, part Digital. Customers now expect digital to drive their experiences. If you are not leveraging your assets on digital, you are 50% invisible as a business today and retailers need help with this.
AI is set to change every industry. Most importantly, it will unleash a new set of customer expectations around hyper personalisation and relevance for customers in their retail interactions. Be ready for that fourth-dimension connectivity. You need to be one of the industry leaders in AI, unleashing the customer data you already have, helping retailers leverage AI to hyper personalise.
Return to your business and ask yourself how you can better engage across the digital reality. How can you help clients build and leverage digital assets to win the race for relevance?
Digital is not about new channels, AI and contact points (although it is those things too). Digital is simply our societal reality today, but more importantly it is about how we make a customer ‘feel’. AI is only useful to us in customer service if a customer feels something positive.
Relational
Ultimately, building Customer Lifetime Value and Customer Intimacy is about building Relationships. It is about moving away from the ‘transaction’ and moving towards a model that is based around putting the Relationship at the centre. This is why CX has become such an inherent part of most companies’ strategy.
It is only when emotions are engaged do we build relationship, when the customer ‘feels’ something. We need to become a trusted partner in life for our customers, not just another product proposition. This is a new space for many brands, traditionally product or process centred.
The more we embed emotional response and authentic, compassionate customer interactions in the customer experience, the more we build that bond with a customer. We achieve both scale and depth of connection.
Look for ways to build significant relationships, with depth, authenticity and purpose. Recall the Taylor Swift fan enraptured with experiencing the product. This type of engagement only comes when there is a significant relationship related to the brand.
In our future deep-fake, AI-fuelled world, authentic relationship will be everything.
CX Strategy Audit
10 Questions to Answer
- If you were to make your business and proposition more BLUE DOT tomorrow, what would that look like? Where in the customer journey could you do a better job at making it about THEM and not about YOU?
- Where could you implement PROACTIVE and SOLUTION DRIVEN approaches, rather than waiting for a customer to ask? How could we build loyalty and brand respect by moving towards a proactive service model?
- Where do we routinely go beyond customer expectations into the delight space? What 5 ideas could we bring to life in the customer journey that would make a customer smile in delight?
- What digital elements add value to the emotive customer experience? Are most of our digital tools about efficiency and process? Where are the delight moments using technology?
- What moments have we created in the last 3 months that would be your Goldfish Story?
- How do you share the moments of delight and above customer expectation internally? How does the organisation hear, routinely, that we are delighting our customers?
- Who is your Excite & Delight Director within your team, responsible for delivering moments that go beyond customer expectation?
- What are you doing in the Employee Experience space that motivates your employees to want to deliver 5-star client service? All of the values discussed apply to employees also.
- If a customer left your brand tomorrow, quoting poor service, where is that failure most likely to have come from in your customer journey? Audit your CX processes, identify pain points and look to dissolve the friction.
- Where is the evidence you are building relationships and Customer Lifetime Value in your proposition? Where are you authentic and pushing past transaction into relationship?
More content from Ken
To get a more detailed feel for Ken Hughes content, check out his Blog – The Blue Dot Consumer. Widely read by those in the marketing, customer experience and retail worlds, it is full of in-depth discussion and content relating to all things consumer.
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For those too lazy to read blogs, and to view further visual content and past performances from Ken Hughes, check out the YouTube channel where he discusses all things consumer and customer experience related.
