The Paradox of Success in the Age Of The Customer

Brigitte Majewski
VP, Research Director
Forrester
Boston Convention and Exhibition Center
Klaviyo Boston

We’re experiencing one of the most innovative eras in consumer history. This boom is driving opportunity for brands and buyers alike. And yet, Forrester research shows that the very facets making companies successful today are also causing their greatest challenges. Join Brigitte Majewski, Forrester Research director, as she reveals these paradoxes and offers a toolkit to reconcile them.

It's never been a better time to be a consumer, according to Brigitte, because so many Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) disruptors have emerged to address pain points in hundreds of industries. (Eg, customized insurance for freelancers or lunch delivery for employees of commercial spaces caught in restaurant voids. represent pain points DTC is aggressively addressing.)

In 2015, Forrester correctly predicted hyper-adoption would ensue, which means it's also a great time to be a DTC disruptor -- consumers will try you! However, Forrester also correctly predicted hyper-abandonment. This is the first of three central paradoxes of the Age of the Customer, which follows the Age of Manufacturing, the Age of Distribution and the Age of Information:

Paradox 1: Hyper-adoption leads to hyper-abandonment.

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However, a third Forrester prediction in the same study was incorrect: that consumers would have less emotional attachment in the midst of hyper-adoption and hyper-abandonment; the opposite is the case. Consumers are not just rapidly, but passionately adopting and rejecting brands, leading to two additional central paradoxes:

Paradox 2: Hyper-innovation leads to hyper-expectation.

Paradox 3: Hyper customer obsession leads to hyper consumer dissatisfaction. 


How can you navigate these three paradoxes in the Age of the Consumer? The first step is to recognize that, while consumers still evaluate on price, quality, trust and convenience, the factors to evaluate quality and trust have now changed.

• Quality used to involve feature and functionality, but now focuses much more on the consumer experience.
• Trust used to involve size, familiarity and legacy, but now focuses much more on transparency and empathy.

Because of this, it is more important than ever to balance short-term and long-term goals and resources. Collecting and using data is vital, but not at the expense of alienating customers who find you "creepy." Being available for customer queries is important at the top of the funnel, but not at the expense of follow-up after the purchase.

​Brigitte recommends:

1. Put humanity back into cusotmer aquisition by treating customers and prospects differently. Prospects don't want personalization, while customers want a "preference center" to customize their level of personalization.
2. Rethink advertising: be not where your customers are, but where your customers want you to be when they want you; more is not better.
3. Question audience-based targeting. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. (Quicken Loans got in trouble for capturing customer contact info whether or not they hit enter.)
4. Question personalization assumptions. 75% want some personalization, 25% want no personalization, but marketers "want to be 100% personalization," with no discussion of how to treat the 25% segment that strongly prefers privacy. (Except at Trader Joes, which collects no customer data.)
5. Drive behavioral and emotional loyalty. (Behavioral loyalty represents the actions a customer takes in relation to the brand, but emotional loyalty is how they feel in relationship to the brand, and that drives transactions. Emotions fight abandonment.)

Brigitte closed by pointing out that many brands create an emotionally inconsistent experience by focusing all emotional delivery before the purchase, but not after. Instead, she recommends Chewy's approach which dedicates an entire "Wow Department" to customer correspondence. Another example is Delta Airlines, which provides all employees attached to a flight a customer manifest detailing loyalty and connection status of each passenger. If a passenger has a tight connection, all the employees can work together to make deplaning easier.

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