Insights2020 is described as the largest global initiative focused on the strategic framework, practical guidelines, and case studies that help marketing and insights and analytics leaders drive customer centric growth.
It builds on Marketing2020, whose findings were published as a Harvard Business Review cover story, and drills into one of that study’s growth drivers: big insights.
Key findings
- The headline finding is a causal claim. Companies that outperform their peers on revenue growth do so by overperforming on key drivers of customer centricity, so becoming more customer centric drives revenue growth.
- The study defines customer centricity as a strategy rather than a program: delivering business value against customer needs, guided by brand purpose, not a set of activities.
- Opportunities and challenges are not shared evenly. The study finds they differ between revenue growth overperformers and underperformers.
- The gaps on the ten drivers are wide throughout. The published pairs run from 91 against 48 at the top down to 40 against 13, with 79 against 13 the widest ratio.
- The study frames the era it was written for as the connected society, projecting a rise from 7 billion devices in 2008 to 25 billion in 2015 and 50 billion in 2020.
What was studied and how
The study rests on more than 350 vision interviews with business, marketing, and insights and analytics leaders, plus a quantitative survey of more than 10,000 respondents from 60 countries. The reported survey base is 10,495.
Four further methods sit alongside the interviews and survey: LinkedIn behavioral analysis, Wharton crowd sourcing, eight global research teams, and a cross-industry and cross-function sample.
Four focus areas structure the work: the role of insights and analytics in driving business strategy and growth, organizing the function, building its capability, and emulating the leadership competencies of overperformers.
The ten drivers
The drivers are grouped under three headings: customer obsession, an insights engine, and total experience, all feeding customer centric growth.
The individual drivers are linking everything to a clear brand purpose, creating experiences based on data driven insights, using insights and analytics to drive consistency across touch points, customer centricity embraced by all functions, and customer centricity as a top priority for leaders.
The remaining drivers are embracing risk and experimentation, insights and analytics leading the business, linking data sources to distil insights, and hiring whole-brain people. Collaboration and critical capabilities complete the ten.
What separates the two groups
The opportunities are turning insights into action across all touch points, behavioral data, personalization, and brand purpose. The study marks these as especially true for overperformers.
The challenges are internal silos and bureaucracy, the legacy of structure and functions, making sense of data, and recruiting whole-brain people. These are marked as especially true for underperformers.
The advisory board named includes Keith Weed of Unilever, Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP, Diego Scotti of Verizon, Jerry Wind of Wharton, Harish Bhat of Tata, Tony Fagan of Google, and Rob Norman of GroupM.
What a company can do with it
The brochure offers to diagnose a company’s current score on each driver, identify growth opportunity areas, and develop a pragmatic roadmap. A scorecard benchmarks the impact of the ten drivers and models growth scenarios from the company’s own scores.
Three formats are offered: a PulseCheck with a growth opportunity workshop, a self-assessment and opportunity workshop with three to five intake interviews, and a 45 minute keynote with a tailored data cut.
Scope and limitations
The published driver scores are shown as percentage agreement pairs without base sizes on the slide, and the brochure reports self-assessed agreement rather than observed behavior.
Source
This page summarises Driving Growth Through Customer Centricity, by MillwardBrown Vermeer, 2015.