Fuse’s collective practice is based on three fundamental beliefs:
To be differentiated and sustainable, a business must provide uniquely valuable solutions to needs that are shared by an addressable group of customers.
To identify these needs and their unique solutions that fit people’s lives, companies must develop a deep understanding of customers.
This approach also applies to employees, partners, and any other critical stakeholders in a business.
These beliefs form a virtuous cycle and have consumer-centric implications both from outside-in and inside-out perspectives.
OUTSIDE IN
The external factors in people’s lives are changing quickly and constantly. However, people’s deep motivations and needs remain relatively unchanged over time. What people desperately want are ways to map their needs to the current landscape of solutions to:
Neutralize barriers introduced to their lives and amplifying the enablers
Sort new solutions that actually fit their lives from the false promises that don’t deliver
Minimize time and effort spent learning how to do things in new ways, so they can maximize time spent on reaching goals related to what’s important to them
To help them do so, we need to have high-resolution knowledge of the people we want to reach — their dreams, fears, frustrations, capacity to embrace the new, real-life contexts and constraints — in order to create value propositions and experiences that differentiate on clear and measurable benefits.
To develop this understanding in our constantly changing world, we need to continually learn from our customers as they truly are today, and who they will become tomorrow. We can’t look at past behaviours, we can’t assume ourselves or our loved ones to be universal proxies, we can’t go from the gut. The quality of our human understanding determines the relevance and quality of the solutions we arrive at. This understanding is disruptive in nature and determines where to focus; rapid iteration based on faulty hypotheses simply leads to endless refinement of the wrong solution.
INSIDE OUT
Customers’ shifting expectations, new technologies and increasing competition bring an urgent need for businesses to change. Digital transformation is not really about IT tools and processes, but about rebooting company cultures to create resilience and agility that can cope with a world of heightened volatility and ongoing disruption.
The key is finding new and sustainable ways of working that unleash people’s creativity to experiment so they can create impact within their organisations. This requires alignment between strategy, culture and the individual that comes from establishing a truly customer-centric workforce, so that everyone is pulling in the same direction and looking for business value that clearly provides customers with what they value, in ways they understand, and in forms they can use.
Leadership, employees and partners need a shared vision of what customer-centricity means for their situation. This vision must be translated into models for identifying unmet needs when interacting with customers, tools for capturing needs and framing solutions, two-way communications linking strategy and customer-facing functions, and feedback mechanisms to include customers in this conversation.
HOW FUSE CREATES VALUE
The statement up top are at the core of the belief system that we have refined over many years in our work with corporates, scale ups, startups and NGOs.
We work in every industry, on every continent, across every segmentation of people, and serve every arena of human needs to help clients ensure they are creating the right products, services, touchpoints and communications to connect wth their clients in uniquely valuable ways.
Deep understanding of who your customers are, what is important to them and how they structure their lives, is an absolutely critical input to generating new value propositions, business models and service concepts. Incredibly, the need for this foundational knowledge is often overlooked, dismissed as unimportant, or considered too costly or time consuming. It is none of these things. The quality of results is limited by the quality of inputs. The line dividing success from failure is razor thin. We can enable this understanding of your customer to keep you on the right side of this line.