Businesses are being forced to shift from being product-centric to being customer-centric.
This shift has seen brands move away from having "one-night stands" with their customers to having more meaningful relationships with them.
This was the word from Jason Xenopoulos, CEO of digital agency Native, speaking at Nedbank's Digital Edge Live event in Midrand last week. "The digital revolution was a consumer revolution, he said.
During his presentation, Xenopoulos cited various examples of this shift from sports apparel corporation Nike. NIKEiD, which was introduced by the company in the late 1990s, allowed consumers to personalise and customise their footwear. "Since then, they have really shifted their business to being more people-centric by creating an ecosystem of services to complement their products."
NikePlus was launched in 2006, which saw the brand putting chips in running shoes and allowing athletes to link their running shoes with their mobile devices and share their progress with friends. "Suddenly, the simple running shoe became a sophisticated digital platform. Nike didn't do this because they were enamoured with technology; they did it because they knew that customers would pay more for better experiences. And by wrapping services around their products, they could forge deeper bonds with their customers."
This gamification of our lives means brands are tethering themselves to everything we do, transforming brands into operating systems of sorts, he noted.
For Xenopoulos, this is not about putting the customer at the centre of your business; it is about putting your relationship with your customer at the centre of your business. And the amount of data that businesses have at their disposal allows them to better foster and nurture these relationships.
"We are moving from marketing to people to a situation where people are marketing to one another on your behalf," he said.
When a customer buys a product from you, that should be the beginning of the relationship you have with them, not the end of it, he concluded. "The day will come soon when there is simply no space left on the over-cluttered shelves of the global marketplace for brands that do not offer exceptional and intuitive customer experiences."
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