Consumer behavior is changing faster than businesses, and digital transformation is needed to help them keep pace. A company’s product or customer-centric strategy shifts to a life-centric approach in order to grow through relevance and create momentum for the future.

The company's top management agrees: Achieving meaningful growth has never been more challenging. After years of global turmoil, companies need new strategies to thrive in the turmoil. At the same time, people are becoming less predictable as economic, social, environmental, and political forces force them to continually reassess their values ​​and decisions.

In our research, however, we found a silver lining: some companies are starting to break out. The fastest-growing companies in our research are broadening the scope of their strategies to transform in ways that drive new growth and relevance. They are using technology more creatively to solve emerging customer needs. Most importantly, our analysis found that companies gaining momentum are not using product-centric or customer-centric strategies—they are becoming life-centric.

A life-centered approach is based on understanding that people are multifaceted and that they accept their own complexities. It involves keeping tabs on the pulse of external forces shaping modern life (whether economic, social, cultural or otherwise) and finding ways to respond that create value for all. Companies adopting a life-centric strategy are willing to make bold, creative changes at the core of what they do, whether that means upending business models and internal operations, or reimagining who their customers are.

Our research has found that businesses that focus on life are the most likely to remain relevant and thrive. They are three times as likely to outperform their peers in speed to market and almost five times as likely to outperform their peers in customer lifetime value.

A life-centered approach aims to remove the burden of complexity by unifying the design of simple but important interactions across the experience continuum. To achieve this, all customer-facing functions—including product, marketing, commerce, sales, and service—must be connected through a single data and experience platform. The full scope of the customer experience needs to be thoughtfully considered in a way that understands and responds to their needs in real time and derives actionable insights from these engagements.