Companies Can Achieve Breakthrough Growth during Uncertain Times by Embracing Life Centricity

As the gap between what customers need and value and what businesses offer widens, businesses that put life-centric strategies into action and meaningfully contribute to customers’ lives will see an annual growth rate of nine percentage points higher on average than their lagging peers, who are likely to shrink year-on-year, found a new report from Accenture. In addition, the report also found these businesses are three times more likely to outperform their peers on speed-to-market and almost five times more likely to outperform on customer lifetime value.

The report, titled “The Life Centricity Playbook: Proven Strategies for Growth Through Relevance,” is based on research of over 1,700 of the world’s leading c-suite executives. The research identified a nearly unanimous challenge globally, with 95% of executives saying their customers are changing faster than they can change their business. 

"As people face constant instability in their lives, they are continuously reassessing their values and sense of purpose,” said Baiju Shah, chief strategy officer, Accenture Song. "Businesses need to adopt a life-centric approach, taking a broader view that allows them to see customers in their full lives and adapt to their ever-changing needs and priorities. Companies that pursue life-centric strategies will not only ignite growth but build long-term advantages becoming our new category leaders into the year and decade ahead.”

The report defines and details the life-centric strategies, highlighting the natural push and pull within customers’ behavior today, noting increasingly unpredictable—even paradoxical behavior—driven by life forces such as economic, social, environmental, and political instability. While businesses once looked to a product-centric approach focused on performance and then shifted to a customer-centric strategy meant to prioritize experience, the report raises the need for a new playbook for growth, life centricity.

Furthermore, while 95% of executives are accelerating digital transformation efforts, 97% feel that those efforts merely allow them to keep pace, not achieve new growth and customer relevance. Amid these findings, our study identified five distinct and proven ways that life centered companies are transforming to capture growth amid uncertainty. They:

1. Gain a profound understanding of people: High-growth companies utilize data, human ingenuity and machine intelligence to understand people’s multi-dimensional lives more intimately, finding new opportunities to add value. According to the study’s findings, companies that do this are 16% more likely to achieve the highest levels of profitability growth and 19% more likely to achieve the highest levels of employee retention.

2. Broaden the canvas for value creation: Companies that focus on sustainable growth by providing customer, social, environmental, and employee value are 26% more likely to achieve the highest levels of market share growth and 24% more likely to achieve the highest levels of customer lifetime value.

3. Creatively transcend industry norms: The report also found companies that creatively apply their technology and talent in new contexts, expanding beyond the structure of their industry and into a broader ecosystem of meeting people’s needs, are 32% more likely to achieve the highest levels of revenue growth from new ventures and 29% more likely to achieve the highest levels of speed-to-market.

4. Design a delightful experience continuum: Companies that design for simple but significant interactions across a unified experience continuum, adding the most amount of value with the least amount of interruption, are 26% more likely to achieve the highlight levels of customer satisfaction and 26% more likely to achieve the highest levels of speed-to-market.

5. Build a fluid operation across functions: The report also found that companies that use human and machine teams to empower talent, unify workflow systems and platforms, as well as design agile organizations are 28% more likely to achieve the highest levels of revenue growth and 23% more lily to achieve the highest levels of profitability growth.

"Every business, within every industry, is now in uncharted waters - with new, complex challenges and opportunities coming at them from all sides and at pace. While growth is always the imperative, being and staying relevant is now harder than ever," said David Droga, CEO and Creative Chairman, Accenture Song. "To succeed in the new reality, companies will not only need to make bold, creative changes to how they best serve their customers. They’ll also need to do it at the speed of life."

The report also provides examples of how some leading organizations have adopted life centricity amid the complex shifts in the relationship between businesses and customers. The full report can be found here.

The “The Life Centricity Playbook: Proven Strategies for Growth Through Relevance” global research is the second in a year-long series of research reports focused on helping businesses understand life-centricity as their new approach to long-term sustainable growth and relevance. The first report, “The Human Paradox: From Customer Centricity to Life Centricity,” can be found here.

These reports can also be explored in Accenture Foresight, Accenture’s new thought leadership app, which provides a personalized feed of the latest reports, case studies, blogs, interactive data charts, podcasts and more.