Customers are disruptive. Restless, digitally savvy, intolerant, and free-spirited, they are driving profound change in what businesses are and how businesses work. There is no single archetype; this is now about anticipating customers at the human and emotional level. Winning requires customer insights and conviction that eclipse your previous understanding.

Attitudes and motivations
What are the attitudes and motivations that drive experimentation? Cause churn? Engender loyalty? Convert emotion to action? These questions have shifted from the operational periphery to the fundamental focus of strategies. Unlocking customer insights unleashes extraordinary competitive advantage.

The operations of emotions
Emotional engagement used to be the art of advertising — it is now the science of operations. Emotion is the primary driver of decisions, loyalty, and spend. It informs the path to purchase and your path to growth. It puts scale on its head, from using segments to find easy, common traits to sensing and responding your customers’ emotional states in the moments that matter.

Systems of insight
Data is fuel. But for most companies, it’s a lazy asset locked in systems of record. Systems of insight unleash that data and translate it into customer insights and actions. This is not better visualization or data lakes or AI for AI’s sake; this is putting in place an end-to-end system that converts potential to reality.

Trust
Divisions abound. Trust in institutions is eroding. Social media has democratized brands and made them fodder for sporadic outrage. This is the reality that you face: Remaking trust in a market rife with security and privacy risk and contending with social networks that can turn a single experience into large-scale outrage.