With challenger brands such as Netflix and Airbnb shaking up the marketplace, a new paper from Amaze explores why disruption occurs, how challenger brands are harnessing it to their advantage and the steps businesses need to take to succeed in the future.
The white paper includes unique research into well established digital disruptors such as Airbnb and Netflix, which reveals the key behaviours of these challenger brands, detailing how they:
• Remove friction to improve customer experiences
• Respond to negativity and adversity by the well-timed offering of something new
• Save their customers’ time.
“With 41% of executives recently surveyed by the Global Center for Digital Transformation believing their company could fold in the face of disruption, urgent action needs to be taken. The answer is right in front of them, not in their business, but in the hearts and minds of their customers,” says Alex Comyn, Chief Strategy Officer at Amaze, the leading digital marketing, technology and commerce consultancy.
With digital disruption set to displace four out of the top 10 organisations across every industry, Amaze explores how businesses can future proof their digital offering in its latest white paper. Entitled ‘Survival of the slickest? How to future proof your business against the new, agile kids on the block’ the paper explores why disruption occurs, how challenger brands are harnessing it to their advantage and the steps businesses need to take to succeed in this new, digitally augmented future.
The white paper highlights the need for organisations to become agile and adaptable enough to quickly respond to developing technologies and evolving customer demands.
In addition, the new white paper outlines the key steps businesses need to take now to truly understand their customers and create the ultimate customer journey.
These include:
1. Formulating an experience strategy
2. Plotting current and idealised ‘future state’ consumer journeys
3. Breaking down the silos
4. Thinking in terms of partnership ecosystems
5. Preparing for fast data
6. Constantly benchmarking your experience
7. Testing in the wild
Liz Deverell-Smith, Senior Strategy Consultant, Amaze: “While disruption is fast becoming a clichéd term, the challenge of responding to young brands who can do new, exciting things faster than you can is very real, and something many of our clients are asking us about. Faced with a test of confidence, relevance and even existence, traditional businesses have a simple choice: adapt or disappear. Ironically, in an age when it has never been more important for organisations to understand customers and centre their business around them, they have never understood customers less.
“Fortunately, there are achievable, practical steps that organisations can take now to succeed in an age of accelerated disruption. This goes beyond merely ‘understanding your customer’ to developing an agile, adaptable, customer-centric model, which delivers greater simplicity and greater value. There is also much organisations can learn from examining how challenger brands are doing just this and then looking at how they can replicate this approach themselves.
“We cannot all shape the future, but we can better understand those organisations that do and learn to take steps to prepare for it by adapting strategies to place the customer at the heart of our operations, before a newer, cooler kid on the block does it for us.”