2024: The year of the planarian

Despite 2023 being a challenging year, it ended with a hint of optimism for business, with a surprise, bigger-than-expected drop in inflation and chatter about a global reduction in interest rates earlier than forecast. That said, if the past few years are anything to go by, the only safe prediction for the year ahead is that it will be unpredictable.

Will your businesses remain cautious in Q1 and keep with the mantra of ‘doing more with less’? Or will you view the challenge reframed as ‘doing more differently with less’?

When the chips are down and teams are under pressure to consistently deliver the numbers, it presents the perfect environment for reinvention, the need to be smarter and outthink, not outspend the competition.

In short, businesses have to adopt the persona of planaria. A species that continually adapts to change and is indestructible.

Sounds good? Here are our top five growth areas to accelerate your regeneration:

Adopt a growth mentality

If you embrace the notion of driving exponential gains by ‘doing different’, you need to be prepared to exit your comfort zone and make a conscious change from what’s been done before. It’s time to look up and out, so:

• Be aware of emerging trends, not just within your sector but broader macroeconomic and societal ones. Use this foresight to scenario plan how you can adapt the brand to these emerging changes for the benefit of your customers.

• Continue to look beyond your competitor set for inspiration. Explore alternative operating models and how others are using innovative solutions, developing new service offerings, exploring different customer service processes and delivering experience excellence to unlock new revenue streams.

Focus on customer mindsets

Demographic segmentation and personas have their place but to drive genuine customer-centricity and innovation a shift to mindset modelling is essential. Mindset modelling has an underlying psychological dimension that brings customer challenges, barriers, drivers and unarticulated needs to the fore. 

By adopting this approach business strategists and product teams are better equipped to tackle some of the more established and complex challenges within their given industry. Think, higher engagement in low-interest categories, behaviour change and habit building within healthcare, repositioning to shift perceptions or drive appeal with a new audience, etc. Consideration should be given to:

• Spend more ‘deep time’ with customers. Qual interviews to delve into people’s attitudes, values and world views and to contextualise this with regards to your offering. Triangulating questions to go beyond the surface level and identify the genuine barriers and drivers and ethnography to observe what people do and how that differs or reinforces what they have told us. 

• Analyse findings to identify insights, commonalities and differences and model into different mindset groups, attaching a simple and understandable name for each.

• Ensure that these new mindsets are circulated across the business including SLT and C-suite so the entire business has a common view of, not just what their customers look like but, what they think like as well. 

AI experimentation (and governance)

If 2022 witnessed a groundbreaking development in generative AI and 2023 saw big tech and a range of startups jostling to keep up 2024 is likely to see increased business experimentation and mainstream adoption. When used responsibly and aligned with your overarching business strategy, AI has the potential to be a genuine game-changer in terms of driving efficiencies, reducing the business’s cost to serve, and unlocking new revenues and putting your customer experience on steroids. 

IKEA was a great success story for this last year. Their AI strategy saw them automate much of the customer service offering and retrain the displaced workers to become interior designers/advisors thereby flipping them from a cost centre to a profit centre. To make the most of AI in the year ahead you should:

• Before anything else, agree on the foundational principles for responsible adoption and use across the business. With this governance and supporting policy in place, your workforce will feel secure and confident to adopt and experiment with third-party AI in their day-to-day roles and explore its proprietary use within the business.

• Once in place, start to develop your AI strategy aligned with your overarching business strategy. See AI as an enabler and accelerator for your business objectives as opposed to a panacea for all your challenges or a siloed technology. 

Consistently run at two speeds

BAU plans and the optimisation of current strategies and solutions are key, but the sole focus on this will leave you exposed to shifts in audience behaviour and new market entrants as well as being slower to react to unexpected macroeconomic and societal change. 

By dual-tracking innovation and experimentation, albeit in a calculated and focused way you can augment your team efforts through collaborations, partnerships, academia and subject matter experts. 

• Fast-track your optimisations and ensure it’s agreed that an element of the ROI derived from this can be utilised to part-fund your innovation stream.

• While your teams will be excited by the potential for innovation, do involve others in the process. This avoids groupthink and the ‘curse of knowledge’, aids team learning and development via exposure to new methodologies, brings the benefit of expertise and knowledge from other sectors, and accelerates progress. It also allows quick wins to be socialised within the business to gain further support and investment. 

Predict and quantify the impact

With the pressure to do more with less remaining in 2024, a laser-focused commercial approach will be essential to build business confidence and secure investment. As such a robust approach to value modelling future initiatives to focus investment where the returns look to be the greatest will be key. 

Deploy rapid innovation, experimentation and testing, which can follow two routes:

• Live, in-market experimentation. Explore a variety of new solutions and guerilla tests in-store or online to gain a litmus test as to whether something gains customer traction and has potential.

• Quant pretesting and prioritising. Rapid solution ideation and research-ready stimulus generation followed by quant testing to identify concepts that most exceed expectations and have the highest propensity to drive action. Normalise the data (to derisk), size the initiatives and calculate the commercial uplift potential to prioritise focus for go-to-market. 

The year ahead

2024 looks set to be a year where we have to adapt to and endure many events beyond our control, from conflict and elections to a potential resurgence in inflation and greater regulation of technology. As such, it looks set to be another incredibly unpredictable year with unexpected challenges and the need to be nimble and quick to pivot and explicit changes as they occur. 

A provocative thought

One thing that is in your control is how you will react to the year ahead. Will you too remain predictable and tread the obvious and seemingly safe path? Or will you take a leaf out of the planaria’s book and find new ways to regenerate? 

Our action-orientated approach can help you look at your business through a different lens and unlock its growth potential to stay further in the black.