Leaders are entrusted with the responsibility for operationalizing the overarching strategy of a business. The goal of strategy, in turn, is to carve out and sustain competitive advantage for a business. Some businesses, unfortunately, fall asleep on the job and awaken to find that they no longer have a captive customer constituency, or a competitive space in the marketplace. They discover that they have become irrelevant.
The businesses that tend to escape this fate and not perish, are those that make perpetual relevance their watch phrase. Perpetual relevance simply means that the primary propellant for a business is an obsessive commitment to aligning continual internal evolution, with the constancy of external changes.
Okay, that was a mouthful. Stated differently, I just meant that when a business embraces perpetual relevance as a strategy, it becomes fixated on making sure that its internal transformation is always in step with market forces and other relevant market dynamics.
Perpetual relevance simply means that the primary propellant for a business is an obsessive commitment to aligning continual internal evolution, with the constancy of external changes.
So, what might the future look like for a business that pursues this strategy?
A business that becomes successful at making perpetual relevance a sustainable development goal, will always be a “fresh” brand. There will be no room for “staleness.” There will be a vibrancy about the brand that makes it attractive to its employees, its customers, its stakeholders and even its competitors.
Another positive outcome will be how the people aspect of the business will be impacted when the pursuit of relevance is applied to releasing human potential. The quality of human capital and the level of competency may be pushed to an unprecedented level that is consistent with excellence. Gone will be the days of perpetual complaining about poor work ethics and sub-standard performance.
When a business embraces perpetual relevance as a strategy, it becomes fixated on making sure that its internal transformation is always in step with market forces and other relevant market dynamics.
Of course, I cannot commit the sin of not reflecting on how perpetual relevance will impact service excellence.
Pursuing a strategy of perpetual relevance sets the state of play for the intersection of value between what a business produces and what customers want and expect. Ultimately, remaining relevant enables the business to ask the right questions that help to support its growth pillars, deepen its value endowment to customers and reduce its vulnerability to market uncertainty.
In the world of service excellence, the challenge is to remain top-of-mind with desired or targeted audiences. Being perpetually relevant, enables a business to win this game of connectivity with its customers. As I’ve mentioned many times before, accumulated insights on customer sentiment towards the business, as well as knowledge of user preferences and expectations, endow a business with the wherewithal to take decisions that are close to the customer.
A business that becomes successful at making perpetual relevance a sustainable development goal, will always be a “fresh” brand. There will be no room for “staleness.”
On the topic of connectivity and relevance with customers, an imperative activity that I walk clients through, is having them respond to the question, “Describe how your customer will evolve, considering the changes in his or her needs, preferences and expectations, in the next ten to five years.”
Generally, I am met with speculative responses that have little bearing on accumulated insights. So, the natural next step is to aggregate customer data and do some trend projections. This activity, whilst it does not yield flawless data, it curtails the client’s tendency to rely, by default, on anecdotal reporting and widens the entryway for making decisions that are close to the customer.
Ultimately, remaining relevant enables the business to ask the right questions that help to support its growth pillars, deepen its value endowment to customers and reduce its vulnerability to market uncertainty.
One of the emerging connectivity trends, is that businesses need to add life-centricity to the customer-centricity mix. Customers have lives and in responding to product and service relevance, businesses will need to be sensitive to how their offered solutions will impact the intersection with customers’ personal value systems and expanding social consciousness, as well.
Let me say here, that at the start of its journey, a business may find that it possesses an environment that is inhospitable to the achievement of perpetual relevance. There are some usual suspects that account for this weakened state. These include a lack of focus on innovation, resistance to creating avenues for generation of new ideas, laggard status in onboarding new technology, absence of customer-centricity and low brand vibrancy.
Before attempting to onboard any methodology aimed at activating its relevance journey, it’s best for a business to become conscious of its flaws and to implement a remediation program that will prepare the environment for change.
Moreover, when a business adds urgency to the mix of its transition actions, the major benefit is the pre-emption of a crisis of irrelevance.