Consumer expectations today have become highly liquid. For example, if you’re a South African bank providing an online experience, your customers aren’t comparing your offering only to what other local banks provide.

They’re comparing it to Amazon and Facebook. Personalised, hyper-relevant experiences have become critically important to consumers.

Importantly, personalisation and relevance differ greatly. Personalisation is often static and time-lagged, delivered at the point of purchase in response to certain customer behaviours.

Hyper-relevance, however, is dynamic and 'always on'. It focuses on using artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to understand customers’ needs in the evolving context in which they make their purchasing decisions.

The traditional approach is failing

The objective of the former 'loyalty era' was creating incentives for brand memberships, which drove repeated purchases. The relevance era upends that thinking.

The goal now is to create a gravitational field that attracts customers into orbit around a brand – a field strong enough to withstand the constant re-evaluation of the digital age.

Many established South African companies are already feeling the effects of the shift in consumer expectations, and executives are seeing long-loyal customers begin to move to competitors.

According to Accenture’s 2017 Global Consumer Pulse, South African companies lost R663-billion in potential revenue in 2017 due to customer switching. Sixty-six percent of those switches happened because customers felt the brand's offerings lacked relevance.

A key reason for this change in behaviour is that in the loyalty era, consumers were discouraged from re-examining their options. In the relevance era, however, a new mobile-enabled and digitally savvy generation is continually challenging, assessing and comparing companies’ offerings. It’s a shift from the loyalty ‘loop’ of once-off assessment to a churn of continual evaluation.

But that’s not all. Consumers are turning ever more to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat to develop opinions about brands. 

And, they’re consulting comparison shopping and review websites at an accelerated rate, with 71% now saying that such online resources are important and influential to their purchase consideration. South Africans are even getting more comfortable acting on recommendations from intelligent-learning applications.

Consequences of the change

Now, more than ever, there’s a need for a strategic rethink. For CMOs, in particular, the new consumer landscape calls for an expansion and realignment of the marketing framework.

Fortunately, with advancements in data analytics, companies now have the ability to see and react to consumer fluctuations that are in the moment. Moreover, every transaction or engagement can be tapped, yielding the key data needed to personalise future experiences.

The age of hyper-relevance is upon us. The message is: adapt, or your customers will switch to your competitors – and soon.
 
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