by Jörn Küpper, Senior Partner McKinsey & Company, Germany
by Steve Collinge, Managing Director, Insight Retail Group Ltd, UK
Sylvain Prud’homme, President, International and President & CEO, Lowe’s Canada
Véronique Laury, CEO Kingfisher, UK
Manufacturers and retailers are closely working together to develop new ways to generate growth within the market. Get inspired by the industry’s leaders and discover a new era on how to develop a new business model of cooperation.
Many manufacturers and retailers are facing the future, and trying to shape it, rather than denying it, but is the industry doing enough? Do the boardrooms understand the urgency and the scale of the demographic changes that are already remaking the industry?
Five years ago, many of the world’s major manufacturers and retailers were primarily concerned about protecting what they had. Some companies held back from online because they feared they would cannibalize our business. Yet if you think along those lines, you are thinking egocentrically, rather than from the consumer’s point of view. If a customer points out which channel he prefers, you can’t ignore it. It’s not a question of cannibalizing your business, it’s a question of being relevant.
The difficulty for the consumer industry’s leaders is that they cannot afford to focus on just one aspect of disruption. Manufacturers and retailers have to navigate three revolutions at once:
One is geographic – the arrival, by 2030, of a billion new consumers in China and 500 million in India.
The second revolution is demographic. Millennial consumers, although not homogeneous geographically, have certain traits in common: being digital natives, looking for an experience, being willing to share rather than own, and wanting things now. And in North America alone, Millennials will inherit more than US$30 trillion, so guess where your customer base is coming from.
The third is technological. The global penetration of mobile phones – studies suggest that two billion people already use a smartphone at least once a month – is enabling consumers to buy what they want, when they want and how they want it. With social, economic, technological and environmental change continuing – and accelerating – companies will need to be agile to survive.
According to KPMG, there is a clear correlation between how customer centric a company is and how fast it grows, as 52 percent of high growth companies answered, in a research study carried out in 2017, that customer trust and loyalty is critical to their success. Moreover, customer centric companies estimate that 44 percent of their revenue comes from online sales.
KPMG suggests that truly customer centric organizations have a number of common characteristics. They are more likely to:
Véronique Laury
Sylvain Prud’homme
Jörn Küpper
Steve Collinge