Single Engagement Fails the Future
The problem with the single engagement model is that ends happen.
Business models are changing. Consumers don’t stay with one brand forever. They move between brands, embracing mobility in the modern marketplace. Customers enjoy the benefits of faster account creation, more convenient payment mechanisms and delivery times counted in minutes. Very few customers are really new to any market nowadays.
Loyalty isn’t the bond many assume. Byron Sharp, in his book How Brands Grow, argues that many people buy out of habit, not loyalty. “Loyalty is everywhere but it’s seldom exclusive – buyers purchase more than one brand, and the more purchases an individual makes the more brands he or she buys. Polygamous or divided loyalty is quite the norm. So, no brand should expect its buyers to be 100% loyal.”
Business innovation has been focused around the on-boarding and usage experience. They overlook the need for a business to offer the consumer a good off-boarding experience. This results in a proliferation of cliff edges where the consumer experience drops off suddenly when the end happens.
In this fallout, assets are lost, responsibility is shunned and opportunity for long term engagement disappears. We can define this approach as a single engagement model. This is where a business is structured around a single engagement of sales, onboarding and usage.
Everything comes to an end, and so will the engagement a business has created with a consumer. When the end happens, shards of broken experiences break off. These fragments then linger in the physical, service or digital environments. Examples of such broken shards of experience are the plastics in the sea. They are resources a company failed to keep within the consumer lifecycle so as to be able to reclaim them in a controlled way. Or they may be the lingering images that a consumer was encouraged to share online by a company that failed to design a way to un-share those assets. They might also be a financial product, like a pension, that someone created decades ago, but is now lost because the company failed to create an ending that would last for the length of a career, life or marriage.
Opportunities lie in moving away from a single engagement model towards a world that imagines and innovates around the end stage.
