The article rejects both available answers. The question is not whether to go back in time in search of authentic connections and the human touch, nor whether to fast forward into an efficient, technology-led, frictionless future. The claim is that growth overperformers manage to offer the best of both worlds.
The context is that fundamental changes tend to follow significant global events, and the pandemic produced an exponential shift in how commerce is conducted, with consumers trying different stores, channels and brands to an extent not seen before.
Key findings
- The direction of travel is described as a reversal: machine learning now recommends products to individuals based on signals emitted by online behavior, moving from people finding products to products finding people.
- Ninety-one percent of CMOs globally believe today’s commerce experience needs to be re-humanized.
- Only 19 percent of CMOs believe today’s commerce experiences across touchpoints and channels are intuitive.
- Sixty percent of marketing and growth leaders disagree that today’s commerce experience is delivered with empathy, and no more than 14 percent believe brand purpose is authentically reflected in it.
- On weighing the interests of shareholders against all stakeholders, both groups moved after COVID, but by very different amounts. Underperformers moved from 27 to 36 percent, and overperformers from 33 to 54 percent.
The yes and the but
The article works through the trade-offs in pairs. Remote shopping prevented unnecessary virus exposure and cheap fast delivery serves rural consumers better, but the consumer data gathered raises privacy and security issues, customer service becomes impersonal, and gamed reviews increase mistrust.
New platforms let smaller brands open storefronts and compete against the dominant players, with 1.3 million businesses in 175 countries on one platform alone, and social commerce pioneered in China is already a 63 billion dollar business. But the practices of large platforms leave small brands less able to compete and put their intellectual property at risk from own-label versions of best sellers.
The article does not soften the human cost. Frontline warehouse and delivery workers bore the brunt of virus exposure, often with insufficient personal protection, brutal working conditions and low pay. And tax avoidance by dominant platforms has left fewer funds for investment in local communities and infrastructure.
The risk it names is specific: as the technification of commerce continues, the humanity and consumer-centricity that underlies real long-term growth is at risk. Chatbots replace human interaction, algorithms replace human expertise, targeted communication replaces the pleasure of serendipity, and whole communities are weakened by the reduction in everyday interactions.
Three dimensions of a humanized experience
The first is how personalized the experience is: how far it is tailored to the customer’s needs and fit for purpose. The article argues effective personalization requires deep empathy, and points to design thinking as a process that fosters it, noting that when applied to business the success rate for innovation improves substantially.
The reframe offered is to treat evolving customer expectations as an opportunity rather than an annoyance, quoting Jeff Bezos on customers as the beautifully and wonderfully dissatisfied, and on focusing on customers rather than competitors because customers continually pull you into a future they define.
The second dimension is how pervasive the experience is: flawlessly connected and consistent across all channels and touchpoints, with each channel playing its specific role. A pervasive approach is also inclusive, taking in partners and consumers, because seamless experiences are not possible without all the actors that play a part.
The third dimension is how purposeful it is, meaning genuinely meaningful with a purpose integral to how the brand creates sustained value for all its stakeholders. The test offered is a single question: how does this brand help make the world a better place.
The examples run across all three. A fashion brand partnered with WeChat so customers can have pre-selected items waiting to try on in store, reserve a fitting room, choose a playlist and pick the lighting. A UK retailer fused stores, site and app so in-store assistants carry tablets that can complete a sale anywhere in the store and arrange home delivery of out-of-stock sizes. A truck hire company redefined its role around the whole moving experience, and a bike brand includes a party blower with every delivery.
Five things a brand can do
The first is to empower frontline employees to make decisions that delight customers, on the basis that not everything needs to be perfectly automated. The examples given are a food retailer with an actual random acts of kindness policy and a budget for it left entirely to staff discretion, and a hotel group that lets employees spend up to 2,000 dollars to solve a customer problem without asking a manager.
The second is to use technology to enhance rather than replace colleagues’ skills, removing rote and tedious work so human creativity can address complex issues, and always letting the customer opt out of an automated process to talk to a human. The article notes chatbots can be effective on frequently asked questions but highly ineffective if customers are left in endless loops.
The third is to build institutional empathy. Big data is described as excellent at generating hypotheses, but companies need to spend more time on interviews, research groups and ethnography to understand the why. The article warns that just because you can do something does not mean you should, and gives the example of a carmaker introducing a climate control feature for pets left in the car after listening to driver feedback.
The fourth is to think long-term and operate regeneratively, against a default corporate model the article calls extractive. It cites one company paying 2 million pounds on gross profits of 70 million in the UK in 2019 as an example of the cost to communities, and a beverage company approaching a 100 percent water replenishment rate globally as an example of the alternative.
The fifth is to eliminate internal silos, which the article calls possibly the biggest blocker. It cites research by Bain in which 94 percent of respondents saw the biggest impediment to growth as the internal, dysfunctional organization itself, and notes that while 50 percent of overperformers say they are effective at removing internal barriers, double the underperformer score, that is still only half.
The fix proposed is not structural. Rather than redesigning responsibility charts, the article suggests clear guiding principles, offering the example of not asking permission but asking whether the action delivers on the purpose, and asking forgiveness in the worst case. It also cites a technology company that found its biggest impediment to innovation was its own HR policy and responded with a program using only team targets.
Scope and limitations
The CMO figures throughout are drawn from one source, the IRG CMO panel of 2021, and the company examples are illustrations rather than measured outcomes.
Source
This page summarises Humanizing Commerce, by Frank van den Driest, Mark Murray, 2021.