quantivblog

Sometimes it’s a really great feeling to found out that you’re in pretty good company on a given idea.

At Quantiv, one of our guiding principles is that organisations need to change at the same pace as the needs of the market in order to grow and thrive.

This is an idea proposed very eloquently by McKinsey’s director Richard Foster in his report The Pace of Change: Managing in Turbulent Times, and one echoed in his best-selling book Creative Destruction. For Foster, only those corporations that change at the pace and scale of the markets they serve will do well.

The incredible pace of change we’re seeing every day in terms of retail habits, for example, is something we’ve been working hard on with our clients. High Street shopping isn’t what it used to be, now that footfall can be replaced by purchases over the Internet. It can be a frightening world for companies struggling to keep up with consumer behaviour – or a very exhilarating world for companies who relish the challenge of meeting the new opportunities to engage with customers that are opening up all the time.

It’s always been imperative for businesses to understand their customers, but in today’s world it’s a question of staying ahead of customers and their technologies. It’s a case of realising what’s around the corner, and acting fast and smart to meet it head on and capture the new touch point. That’s what we help our clients do, and it’s something we love doing.

As we work on a practical level helping organisations engage with their audiences in an ever-evolving technological landscape, it’s great to be able to look to McKinsey’s and their ilk as well as thinkers including sociologists like Richard Sennett and legal academics like Tim Wu to see what they say about where consumer behaviour is going. It’s a neat coming-together of academae and business – and we’re in good company.