Five ways to win the consumer of 2030, now

Today, most companies are trying to protect a legacy of competitive advantage by leveraging their scale and finding incrementally better ways to do what they do already. But the degree and accelerating pace of consumer changes are turning heritage into baggage as trusted capabilities lose relevance.

A bolder shift requires vision and speed. Agile market entrants are using technology and new routes to market to shred incumbent business models. It took Halo Top just six years to become a best-selling ice cream brand. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos reminds his shareholders every year that, as far as he’s concerned, the company is at day one, every day. And as Peter Drucker said, “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."

The successful products and services of the future likely don’t exist today. Consumers will expect more transparency, personalization and connectivity than is currently possible. In our Experience Everything world, brands do not define consumers, they are defined by consumers; product cycles flex in real time to meet hyper-fluid changes in taste; and consumers use baseline designs to become co-creators.

Leaders need to reinvent their business, but very few have the opportunity to abandon everything that’s diminishing in value and move forward with only what they need. The strategic challenge is to address three requirements: maximize the declining benefits of existing business models to fund transformation; build on current capabilities in ways that drives new business models for the medium term; and create new capabilities that enable a pivot into new opportunities.

Consumer-facing companies love to put purpose at the heart of strategic presentations. That wouldn’t have been the case a few years ago; leaders today know that defining and articulating a sense of purpose is an essential part of engaging consumers and talent. But most organizations articulate a purpose today that is well-intentioned yet too broad to give them any advantage in the future worlds we are modeling.

Currently, companies anchor their purpose in a set of values that most people would agree with, like caring more for the environment or bringing families together. Future consumers will be much more tribal.

In our Waste Nothing world, consumers’ values are far more important to them than they are to consumers today. They want to express those values in all of their purchase and consumption choices; and they won’t consider brands that don’t meet their demands. The same applies to talent and ecosystem partners: people in the Waste Nothing world only work for and with organizations that reflect their shared purpose.

Try to please everyone, and you’ll delight no one. But take the risk of standing out from the crowd, and there’s scope to form deep, lasting and profitable connections. Companies must take leadership on the values and concerns of the consumers and talent they target – their tribes – for purpose to generate competitive advantage. Nike’s alignment with Colin Kaepernick indicates the direction of travel.

Leaders need to embed their purpose right across the business. Future success will require more than making purpose apparent at every touchpoint. Everything the business does will have to articulate – not just reflect – its purpose, from the way it uses artificial intelligence to the ecosystems it joins or creates.

Today companies are trying to win and retain consumers by optimizing the experience they deliver at every point along the path to purchase. New technologies are turning that pathway into a longer and more winding road, crossing channels and blending physical, online and mobile. But the future worlds we are modeling fundamentally challenge any idea of purchasing based on a linear journey.

Tomorrow's “superfluid” consumers do not follow a predictable pathway. They purchase goods, services and experiences in micro-moments. They decide to buy, complete the transaction and get what they paid for in the blink of an eye. They often don’t know or care who actually supplies what they’ve bought; their AI curates choices for them. In our Ascendant Consumer world, brands that are a millisecond behind the competition are instantly irrelevant.

Instead of being loyal to a brand, consumers want to feel part of something they have helped to define and create. To gain a competitive advantage in our future worlds, companies must be able to shape demand by continually adapting what they offer, when they offer it and at what price – for each consumer, in each micro-moment. Anything that slows the process is unwanted friction, which the consumer does not tolerate. Business models designed for more prosaic engagement will fail.

Today, companies try to engage consumers by promising that their product or service will give them a unique benefit. The extent to which it actually delivers can be hard, or impossible, to tell. Do expensive skincare brands really work better than generic alternatives? How sustainable is the salmon in your sushi? The consumer often has to take it on trust. To thrive in the future worlds we are modeling, companies need to deliver measurable outcomes.

The problem isn’t that companies don’t want to be more transparent. Rather, it’s a problem with data. Nutritional information, for example, is based on aggregated average data from large population sets, not the individual consumer. Companies are experimenting now with ways to build competitive advantage by bridging that data gap. Nestlé, for example, has 100,000 consumers signed up to a pilot project in Japan: consumers who send the company a DNA sample receive personalized nutrition.

The smart consumers of the future will have total transparency about the quantifiable consequence of every purchase and consumption choice they make. In our Better Self world, personal AI gives consumers live insights at the point of decision – ranging from the impact on their personal and mental health, to their social and financial wellbeing, to the impact on their community, the wider environment and the global population. Consumers exchange these insights with companies, which compete to provide goods, services and lifestyles that deliver the outcomes they want.

Consumer-facing companies can create new ways of generating value today by anticipating this shift from generalized brand promises to measurable, personalized outcomes. A bifurcation is inevitable between low-value generic goods and those that deliver quantified, differentiated and relevant value.

New technologies and business models are disrupting the kind of value chains that companies have relied on for decades. Consumers expect much higher levels of control, customization and service, and it’s increasingly difficult to meet these expectations in a way that is profitable. In the future worlds we’re modeling, these linear business models are stretched past the breaking point.

Today, many companies are responding to disruption by implementing more agile and demand-responsive networks. This kind of transformation can be a powerful generator of competitive advantage. Our future worlds suggest how these new networks could evolve into far more complex ecosystems.

A defining feature of our Balanced Life world, for example, is that consumers strive to achieve the perfect equilibrium between what they need to consume and how much they consume. A hypothetical product in this world is a personalized drink that uses your real-time health and wellbeing data, and an understanding of what the rest of your day looks like, to serve the optimal balance of calories, nutrients and bespoke medication, manufactured on the spot. The experience is simple and convenient for the consumer, but delivering it requires a vast and complex ecosystem of players from consumer goods, technology, pharma and other industries.

In our future worlds, these complex ecosystems are always led by one dominant player – the ecosystem orchestrator. They coordinate a fragmented network of partners and suppliers and capture the most value, but other roles are profitable.

The challenge for leaders today is to anticipate what ecosystems might emerge, identify those they want to create and decide where in the ecosystem they want to play. The focus should be on where you can generate the most value and who can bring the third-party solutions — like micro-manufacturing — that build your competitive advantage in ways that you couldn’t do on your own. Your decisions will have implications for the operations and capabilities you have now.