McKinsey partner Edwin van Bommel spoke at the recent JWT Digital & Innovation Conference about what it takes to turn digital capabilities into winning strategies for growth.
What did you talk about?
I talked about what’s on the minds of most executives today: how to become a winner in digital marketing and sales. The most important thing to know is that digital sales is increasingly becoming about the experience rather than the product. And that experience has to be omnichannel if you want to engage your customers. In the very near future, 16 percent of retail sales will be influenced by digital.
To win in digital, companies need to get three things right: Discovery, Design and Delivery. What do I mean by these 3 Ds? Well, Discovery is about creating a comprehensive picture of your customer and linking what know about the customer to the experience that customer is going through at a specific moment in time. Clearly you need the data, but you also need to understand boundaries. What sets discovery up for success is that it incorporates an “opt-in” approach based on how much a customer wants to share. Design is about creating the experiences that matter to the customer—and to the business. That’s based on a few things:
- desirability—Does it really add value on a regular basis?
- viability—Is it based on trust and does it meet the bar of something that you as a company should do?
- feasibility—Is this something you can actually do?
And then Delivery is about developing the mechanisms, processes, and teams to deliver the offers to the customer effectively.
What aspect of your presentation appealed to the audience?
People understood the idea of the Discovery, Design, Delivery. But what they really seemed to respond to was the idea that you have to do all three. Just doing one or two isn’t enough for companies to be agile and digital to the core. Imagine having a wonderful analytics system that provides fantastic insights that can change your business. But then there aren’t the people or the processes to turn those insights into actions that are delivered to the marketplace. That, in fact, is a case that’s playing out in many companies today as they spend significant sums on analytics, but not on the processes to turn them into better decisions and actions. Bringing together these three Ds helps companies focus on how to get things done rather than on trying to design the perfect data set or a flawless strategy.
