GROWTH STRATEGY INSIGHTS

A Customer Focused Approach for Uncovering New Strategic Domains

Many organizations talk about being customer centric. They deploy design thinking teams to empathize with customers and uncover new opportunities. But how are they determining where to focus those efforts? What methods are being used to establish investments in new domains?

Although the project work might be customer-centric, the establishment of the domains often is not. Perhaps it is a whim of an executive, or a 5-forces analysis. This made us wonder: how can we make the portfolio strategy process more customer-centric?

We believe that the best way to determine where to invest in innovation should be led by a deep understanding of customers and the unmet needs they experience within their day-to-day lives outside the current products and services frameworks.

We Dig Deep into the Lives of Consumers to Uncover Implicit Needs that Open Up New Game-Changing Domains

We take a rigorous approach to making sense of the experiences and needs of people with a lense that pushes clients beyond their organizational bias and current business pressures. Our research uncovers people’s fundamental beliefs, values and goals—helping clients craft domains that tap into latent needs that are currently unmet.

The outputs of this process help clients embed new domains into their portfolio management process, enabling them to prioritize initiatives, bucket investments, measure impact and communicate progress of innovation within those domains.