In the Art of the Possible podcast, Peter Dixon discusses how his journey from an engineer to Chief Creative Officer helped him discover the importance of branding through art. By using the art of the possible, companies can create meaningful customer experiences.

Listen here to learn how brands can use the art of the possible to create meaningful customer experiences.

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After months of working from home, some businesses are eager to return to the office–and many remote employees can’t wait to get out of the house.

But as case numbers continue to surge, employers are moving deeper into pre-emptive planning. When will it be safe to go back to work, and when it is, what should offices look like? How should they function, especially with millions of people planning to continue to work remotely?

Workplaces used to be default destinations–a place we went just because we had a job. Now, as 42 percent of Americans continue to work at home, we have learned we don’t need to be in an office building to be productive. But the truth is, we all seek human connections, and many companies are aware that while the work is still getting done, leaders worry that employees are not as engaged or collaborative as they used to be – the jury is still out.

“The truth is, we all seek human connections, and many companies are aware that while the work is still getting done, leaders worry that employees are not as engaged or collaborative as they used to be

The design questions keep multiplying. First, there’s safety. How many people in an elevator? Are HVAC systems adequate? What about contact tracing? Fairness is also an issue: Can workspaces integrate and support digital workers and those who are physically in the building? And perhaps most importantly, there are concerns about adaptability, how do we design offices for a hybrid workforce that will use spaces in ways that continue to evolve and change?

As Prophet reconfigures our own workspaces, we’re taking into account a need- and desire- to be physically together, at least some of the time. And we’re using service design to zero in on the four major “use cases” that our new offices will need to support: connection, collaboration, concentration and culture. While these principles have always been a big part of our work lives and office design, they will be enabled in the workplace in different proportions now.

A more intentional design inverts the current allocation of space from productivity to collaboration. Besides potentially reducing square footage by 20 to 30 percent, it also requires that the office become a place that supports the work of both physically present and remote team members.

[Figure 1a & 1b:] A more intentional design would invert the current allocation of space from a “productivity” orientation to be more “collaboration” focused.

Flexibility is key to these plans. The question for all businesses isn’t so much who will work remotely and who won’t, but rather, when do team members need to be in an office and when will they be working from other locations.  The share of working days spent at home is expected to climb from 5 percent, pre-COVID, to 20 percent. Experts say employers should envision a world where people work remotely from one to three days per week. How can they work better when they are remote? And what “jobs to be done” should be supported on days when they choose to work from an office?

While offices must accommodate the activities of some specialists, the new space configuration must primarily work for an interdisciplinary workforce and support a wide variety of activities. Multi-functionality and flexibility will be important to feasibly and practically accommodate these four use cases.

Connection: Co-workers need each other

The need to connect goes beyond the transactional aspect of production and knowledge sharing – even the most intense introverts need to know they are part of a larger whole. We’re envisioning this space as informal, with cafes, kitchens and casual spots to catch up, as well as digital, with places to check-in and gather daily information.

[Figure 2:] Connection includes digital check-in capabilities, casual touch base areas and kitchen amenities.

Collaboration: Building better ideas

For many companies, the biggest emerging challenge in remote working has been in encouraging innovation. Like Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, some call working from home “a pure negative” when it comes to ideas and creativity. We have been employing effective ways to be creative with a more distributed workforce, but after canvassing our team we recognized a need for providing ways to work together in our offices.

We see the need for at least three types of space: traditional–but teleconference enabled–conference and teaming spaces, more fixed “studio” areas with workstations and equipment that doesn’t travel easily and work that benefits from collective interactions, and flexibly outfitted areas that can accommodate medium to large groups in easily re-staged, digitally supported environments with moveable equipment, furniture and fixtures.

[Figure 3a & 3b:] Collaboration spaces include digitally-enabled conference and team rooms, flexibly outfitted spaces for medium to large groups and more fixed studio areas with workstations that enable collective teamwork.

Concentration: Alone together

Perhaps one of the pandemic’s biggest take-aways is that not everyone can focus while at home, with working parents especially struggling. And even those in more collaborative roles still need a quiet space to write a memo or a phone booth for a conference call.

Quiet rooms for more individual “deep work” like copywriting or product design and development, are becoming a destination for those jobs requiring more solo work, more mental focus and concentration. But they still want to be close to others, creating more of an “alone together” feeling.

[Figure 4:] Concentration supports workstations and furnishings and lighting to enable deep thinking for solo practitioners.

Culture: This is who we are

Finally, shared spaces need to do something less easily defined. They should express what an organization stands for, accommodate its rituals and project its values. Again, flexibility is critical–how can these spaces make occasional large group interactions and events possible? How can they bring teams together–both in-person and virtual–in new ways to reflect a new way of working?

Ultimately, this piece of the puzzle may be the most important. The pandemic has taught us that “work is not a place;” and that the workplace can be so much more than a lobby, a desk and a conference room.

The spaces and functions of the workplace need to come together for a purpose–and with a purpose; representing and enabling what an organization stands for and believes.

[Figure 5:] Culture space includes flexible but well-equipped environments with fixed and movable equipment and furnishings that support external meetings and internal gatherings.

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The human need for shared spaces

As businesses welcome people back after months of fear and uncertainty, nearly all have been forced to think differently about their “shared spaces.” For all the anxiety about the details, (Are we opening too soon? Too slow?) there’s an undeniable joy, too. People want to be together.

“I don’t know when it will be safe to return,” wrote musician Dave Grohl, in a recent Atlantic Monthly essay about the return of live concerts. “But I do know that we will do it again, because we have to. It’s not a choice. We’re human…we need each other.”

Businesses know this is true. And in amazingly short order, they’re figuring out the safety protocols, redesigning experiences for physical distance and better sanitation. But the post-pandemic reopening is offering the opportunity for something much bigger: A complete reimagining of these spaces, a reset of their purpose, a shift to in their development and, most of all, a new standard for trust.

The smartest companies are asking how they can use this moment not just to reignite, but also to accelerate the transformation that was in front of them even before the crisis. Doing so requires a teardown of current thinking, with great sensitivity to the many ways the world has changed. These leaders aren’t waiting around for “the new normal.” They are looking ahead to what some are calling “New Possible.”

Purpose: Finding meaning in shared spaces

From retailers and restaurants, to hotels and hospitals, the best practices for sanitation, hygiene and crowd density become clearer every day. Many organizations are making customers and employees protection from illness their highest priority. But now that doors are opening, what’s missing is the bigger issue of purpose, and why these spaces exist at all.

Their function is obvious. Everyone knows what people do at airports, theaters and sushi bars. But that’s not the same as understanding purpose. These places exist to connect, inspire and nourish us, to feed our larger need to be with others. It’s what we feel in these spaces, not what we buy there. Companies need to take this moment to reimagine the potential of shared spaces to fill these deeper needs.

Office buildings are a good example. Initially designed as a place for productivity, architects typically devoted 70 percent to productivity-focused areas and 30 percent to collaboration spaces, such as conference rooms and teaming rooms. Now that we know people can be productive anywhere, offices need a new purpose and perhaps a different allocation of space. Are they centers for occasional collaboration? Are they places where coworkers can bond and support each other?

Service design: Empathy-driven innovation

Increasingly, companies are viewing shared spaces with an eye toward service design, which means treating space as a tool to make lives easier for those who use them. They’re developing new experience principles, and aligning those with overall business strategy.

That includes physical innovations to make layouts, interiors, materials, fixtures, furnishings and equipment work together to deliver effective yet safer interactions. New spaces will be easier for employees to sanitize, and built in a way that this cleanliness is evident to worried customers.

Digital tools in physical spaces play an enormous role. These include no-touch operations, such as motion actuation, facial recognition, voice activation and gestural interfaces. Mobile devices are emerging as a critical component, allowing for seamless experiences within a physical space, developing “sensing” capabilities and user-data capture to track behaviors for better and safer operations.

Some of these innovations are small, obvious and even quick, like foot-activated doors. Others require major mind shifts and soon, new buildings. As health experts learn more about air quality and its role in disease transmission, for example, heating, ventilation and air conditioning are no longer architectural afterthoughts. They’ll become key considerations in new design.

Trust: Re-earning confidence

When it comes to shared spaces, nothing is as important as trust. People need to feel that they can count on the companies they deal with to keep them safe when they venture out–including protecting them from people who might be less concerned with physical distancing than they are.

Foundationally, people build relationships with brands through trust. In recent years, that’s focused on brand quality. But today, trust is measured by how the company did or did not respond to the crisis, or how it is restarting. People are asking: Do I trust this airline to keep me safe? This shoe store?

This won’t be easy, especially since many companies have already broken this trust, and continue to do so. Those that can regain customer confidence by offering safety and consistency will find themselves more relevant than their competitors.

Creating a culture of care

All three of these–purpose, service design and trust–require companies to lead with radical empathy, creating spaces where humans feel safe, respected and happy.

It calls for a culture of care. This need for empathy is profound, based on the knowledge that even as many people long to be back in shared spaces so they can feel more human, many are also frightened.

Cultural care becomes a key ingredient. Germ control and crowd management may be essential, but if handled too aggressively, they can seem hostile and unfriendly. And that can interfere with the elements of hospitality, warmth and sanctuary people crave in public spaces.

With that in mind, companies can approach every decision about physical space through these three lenses:

START: What new functions, services or physical elements should the space contain that are not part of the current design?

STOP: What functions, services or physical elements of the current model should no longer be part of the experience?

CONTINUE: What functions, services or physical elements of the current model should be kept as part of the experience?

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COVID-19 has changed our perceptions of physical spaces. It has caused an upheaval in how we work, shop, interact with one another and so much more. But as society re-opens, we need to move past the short-term “fixes” that many essential businesses introduced during the onset of the crisis and think about the long-term implications of what comes next.

Businesses and brands need to understand what are and what will be, the drivers of customer behavior in this next period so that they can reimagine their experiences and services to deliver against them. Without question, digitally-enabled experiences will play a major part of the “new possible” and brands need to respond and prepare their organizations today.

Read our guide to learn:

• What does the “new possible” look like and how to accelerate transformation
• Where to start and what are the steps required to develop the right strategy and new experience principles
• What are the next generation experiences that will define how to operate effectively in this new environment

Download the report below.

Consumer expectations are constantly being reset. And, with digital technologies and new data-driven value propositions disrupting markets seemingly on a daily basis, it can be hard to determine what is working for successful businesses today. But, when we take a hard look at what is helping companies achieve sustainable growth, we see one common characteristic: a focus on delivering a better customer experience.

“Companies that offer exceptional customer experiences are the fastest-growing, healthiest businesses.”

Prophet’s Brand Relevance Index^TM (BRI) confirms that companies that offer exceptional customer experiences are the fastest-growing, healthiest businesses. People don’t just admire these high-experience brands; they find them indispensable in their lives. And they are drawn to these companies not for the promises they make, but for the experiences they create.

Customer Experience Drives Relevance

Improving your existing customer experience and creating new, engaging ways to interact with customers should be your number one priority. And while there are countless ways to enrich an experience, we’ve found the changes that make the most impact can be categorized in two simple ways:

1. Make It Easy

Make using your product or service easy by streamlining the experience with simple processes, fewer steps and clear functionality. Changes should be intuitive and promote seamlessness and speed. Amazon, one of the most highly ranked brands in our BRI, is perhaps the best example, churning out ordering, payment and device innovations that have redefined what it means to shop.

2. Make It More Engaging

Enhance your connection with customers by adding new moments, personalization and content. Richer experiences intensify the relationship between people and products, and new ideas encourage discovery, loyalty and even advocacy. Netflix, another highly relevant brand from our Brand Relevance Index, achieves its off-the-chart levels of engagement with its exclusive, binge-worthy programming.

Doing at least one of these–and preferably some aspects of both–demonstrates that you understand what truly matters in people’s busy lives and that you’re able to provide products and services that keep pace as their needs and interests change.

Beyond Insights to Understanding

To create customer experiences that fuel growth, it’s important to have a holistic vision, one that helps you understand what matters in peoples’ lives beyond just their path to purchase. Creating a great customer experience is not just about removing the pain points along the customer journey (though that matters too!).

Rather, it is about seeing the big picture of what is important to consumers in their daily lives: how they interact with other people (and other brands), use technology, and spend their time, money and attention beyond their interactions with your product or service.

While what happens at any given touchpoint with your brand matters, a bigger picture emerges from a combination of those encounters:

• Where are your consumers coming from?
• What they are trying to accomplish?
• What is really interesting to them?

Awareness and understanding of this context should shape the interactions consumers have with your products, services, people or messages, which in turn will shape perceptions and feelings about your brand–it allows you to form a relationship with the customer beyond the transaction.

The right research can help uncover what is most valuable to customers–in their daily lives and in their experience with you. New tools, such as social media mining, purchase history data, and search, web and mobile analytics, allow you to get beyond surveys and ethnographies in order to see what is really driving consumer behavior.

Armed with this deeper understanding of the customer, businesses can start looking for ways to do more than make incremental improvements to the customer experience. There is an opportunity to transform the experience, creating a greater business–and brand–impact.

Transformational Customer Experiences

Our engagements with hundreds of companies have taught us what is important when creating the kinds of experiences that establish relevance and drive business growth. How you address these key considerations, however, is constantly evolving as new competitors, technologies and techniques emerge.

5 Questions to Consider About Your Customer Experiences

It is important to ask these five key questions as you evaluate existing customer experiences or contemplate creating new, more engaging ones:

1. Are we bringing rigor to our customer experience? Ideas should be grounded in consumer insights and business realities, and ensure improvements are linked to the business metrics that matter most.
2. Does the experience show empathy for customers? This requires looking past what is happening in the moment. It goes beyond the path to purchase, technology and pain points to see the human side of the customer experience, both for customers and employees. Great experiences are the enabler of great relationships.
3. Does it take into account the role brand plays in shaping the customer experience and vice versa? In this age of technological disruption, brands are now built by the experiences they create. It’s a virtuous cycle: As brand characteristics inform the experiences, experiences increasingly define the brand.
4. Do your innovations surprise and delight? The currency of keeping customers engaged in an experience is keeping it new. But newness alone is not enough—changes also have to be useful in order to build relevance.
5. Does it leverage tech-enabled intelligence? We believe the best experiences are not static solutions but something that are living and dynamic. This is why we help companies embrace the power of AI, advanced analytics, and big data to build experiences that are more contextual, adaptive, and personalized — to powerfully engage customers, again and again.

Operationalizing these dimensions will help you create brand experiences that matter. Interactions that are easier, more responsive, richer and more personalized drive relevance and sustainable growth.

Is Your Organization Ready?

An ambition to create great customer experiences will be unfulfilled if your organization is not prepared to develop and deliver them. And beyond technological readiness, what is needed is a customer experience strategy that pulls in operational expertise and customer insights from different parts of an organization that are often forgotten and not connected or coordinated in how they interact with customers, the market or each other.

My colleague, Charlene Li, Principal Analyst at our research company, Altimeter has just published a research report on the topic of “A Next Generation Customer Experience Strategy” for “next generation customers.” In it she describes the necessary inputs for developing compelling experiences that drive deep relationships with customers and the required organizational involvement from across the enterprise. She has also developed a maturity model that companies can use to assess their organizational readiness for adopting a more customer experience-centric approach to their business.

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In this series, we have laid out the marketer’s playbook for building a relentlessly relevant brand. So far, we have discussed how these brands consistently follow three critical principles: They are customer-obsessed, they know how to stay inspired, and they recognize the importance of building a culture of innovation.

Why is Pragmatism Important to a Brand?

Very few brands are able to pull off these three principles without owning a fourth–what we like to call being ruthlessly pragmatic. When a brand is ruthlessly pragmatic, it makes smart bets, takes bold steps, fails fast, and experiments consistently.

Pragmatism requires a commitment to finding and maintaining clarity across your brand’s ecosystem. When you have clarity around your brand’s vision, what you stand for (and don’t), how you want your customers to feel, employees to act, and the criteria for success, you have the blueprint through which to drive all brand decisions, strategically, tactically, and economically.

6 Principles to Become Ruthlessly Pragmatic

Being pragmatic may be the most important piece of the puzzle, but also the one that most marketers find the hardest. It’s essential because it’s the one that makes the other three possible. Using the following tenets is a good place to start when building a relentlessly relevant brand:

1. Be clear and consistent on what your brand is and is not

A strong brand vision guides every decision and action you take. When Prophet partnered with T-Mobile to help it become the “Un-Carrier” in wireless, we knew it would only be credible if T-Mobile lived up to that vision by walking away from historical practices that irked consumers, such as long-term contracts, termination fees, and predatory data plans. And it worked: T-Mobile gained 1.1 million customers after announcing the Un-Carrier strategy, quickly gaining market share from competitors.

https://youtu.be/e8fUXovvZcs

2. Strive for success, but be willing to fail (fast)

Brand leaders must know precisely what success looks like in every metric and key performance indicator available. With metrics in place at all levels, companies can accurately assess how well they are delivering.

Capital One conducts thousands of test-and-learn experiments and pilots every year to continue to hone in on what is resonating with customers from an offering, experience, communications, and brand perspective. It tries and limits its spending on each, succeeding or failing fast and scaling the successes even faster.

3. Empower your employees to be brand ambassadors

Creating a shared mindset across an organization enables employees to wow customers with consistent and compelling experiences. Nordstrom, Southwest Airlines, and Zappos seem worlds apart from competitors because their employee training goes beyond what to do and instead teaches how to think.

4. Have a clear, compelling message

Think about Apple, Patagonia and Disney. All three of these brands stay on message, on strategy and on-brand. They make it easy for customers to follow their plotlines and even easier for customers to want to stay connected with their brands. Clear and consistent messages lead to clear expectations, which lead to customers feeling empowered and loyal.

5. Create an experience that reflects your vision as a brand and company

The brand’s vision is a critical lens through which all business decisions should be made. Some of today’s most respected brands live this day in and day out. Think about the power of these brands’ policies and actions: Chipotle stopped selling carnitas when its sources didn’t meet its standards, eBay provides buyer protection with easy returns and money-back guarantees, and employees at Home Depot are encouraged to stay as long and as patient with every single customer as needed to make sure their home dreams come true.

“Pragmatism requires a commitment to finding and maintaining clarity across your brand’s ecosystem.”

6. Be where your customers are

One of the simplest but often most forgotten tactics, for those brands that are ruthlessly pragmatic, is that they build their brands by being there for their customers, when and where they need them, on their terms. Chick-fil-A is striving to be the brand that is creating 10 million different menus and being able to get your order to you how you want it—order online, in-store, get it delivered, have it catered, etc. They want to be present when it matters. Warby Parker found that customers still enjoy the physical experience of trying on multiple pairs of glasses, not just the five they could get by mail and are now in the process of opening some of the most successful retail operations in the U.S., rivaling Apple and Tiffany’s for sales-per-square footage. They followed their customers’ lead, replicating the best of their online experience and innovated in an “Apple-like” way to get to an in-store experience that is unique, relevant and meets customers where they are at.

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Inspiration is a word companies love to throw around to describe their businesses and brands, but guess what? Most businesses and brands are not inspired or inspiring. They live in functional worlds, providing functional benefits – competing on price, features and share of voice; never truly feeling confident about their decisions.

“They surprise and delight at moments that matter, stay true to their values and turn consumers into passionate brand advocates.”

The brands that stand at the top of Prophet’s Brand Relevance Index^TM, brands like Southwest, LEGO and Starbucks, for example, are inspired brands. They strive for a higher purpose and capture our imagination. They surprise and delight at moments that matter, stay true to their values and turn consumers into passionate brand advocates. And sometimes even more importantly, they inspire the people that come to work for them every day.

5 Ways Smart Companies Find Inspiration

Look beyond your company’s walls and learn from what has worked for others.

1. Smart companies obsess about their customers and deliver what matters.

At Panera, the food is good and priced competitively, while the service is fast and friendly. But it’s the commitment to good-for-you foods—clean, simple, and healthy—that makes Panera an inspired brand. As Americans’ concerns about food and farming have expanded, Panera has led the way in education about agriculture and ingredients. (The new “No-No List” is a great example.) It has earned the credibility to cast itself in a coveted role—a trusted teacher. Customer obsession was covered deeply in our first blog in this series and remains the number one source of inspiration for companies.

2. They “thief and doctor” best practices both inside and outside their category.

We often ask the question of our clients, “If you were more like Disney or Uber or Zappos, what would you take from what they are doing to drive change in your organization?” The answers are always surprising. The best healthcare companies, for instance, aren’t just looking to the Mayo Clinic or Cleveland Clinic for inspiration. They are just as likely to be asking how they can provide amenities as luxurious as the Four Seasons, service as consistent as Nordstrom or experiences as magical as Disney. They understand that inspiration usually requires more than imitation. They infuse borrowed ideas with their own brand identity to create a distinctive offering or experience.

3. They explore their own heritage.

Consumers crave authenticity, so brand history can offer an almost endless source of lessons. We often take clients out on what we call “brand safaris” to delve into the stories of companies such as Levi Strauss and Ford Motor Co. Studying how these great American brands honor their heritage, yet still inspire customers today always sparks fresh thinking. Levi’s found its mojo again when the 529 was reinvented into the “hot skinny” jean, and Ford inspired all of us by fully reimagining its F-150. Don’t disregard the past for future inspiration simply because it’s in the past.

4. They think big and small.

Responding to large demographic changes is essential. If you don’t respect Gen Y’s demand to do everything on their phones, you won’t win. But it also means listening to the growing desire for personalization across every customer segment. That trend has inspired companies that range from Birchbox, with its curated beauty offerings, to GE Healthcare, which continues to lead the field with its innovative DoseWatch, leveraging cloud technology to individualize radiation therapy.

5. They take a stand—even a risky one—to stay true to their mission.

As a company, sometimes it’s what you don’t do that becomes the most inspirational. CVS generated a great deal of publicity for its decision to stop selling tobacco products and was in the news again when it resigned its seat on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over the group’s pro-smoking stance. And it did so without apology: tobacco use conflicts with the company’s commitment to helping people on their path to better health.

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Today’s consumers are experts at ignoring the tens of thousands of brands that don’t interest them. But for their favorites, they go above and beyond what “rational” people do. What makes these rare brands—stalwarts such as Apple and Starbucks, or emerging favorites such as Stitchfix and Snap—stand out from the competition?

These brands, as noted in our Prophet Brand Relevance Index^TM, have made it their mission to continually find new ways to engage and delight customers. We call these relentlessly relevant brands. These brands religiously commit to four big principles: customer obsession, distinctive inspiration, pervasive innovation and ruthless pragmatism.

In this blog, we’ll look at the first tenet: Customer obsession.

It’s The Customer’s World; Brands Are Simply Living in It

Today, customers respond to brands that respond to them. It’s not just about what they buy, it’s how they buy it; getting what they want, how and where they want it. And they want to buy from brands that “get” them. Brands that fail to embrace a profound customer-centric “outside-in” approach are at risk of being quickly dismissed and overtaken by challengers, potentially overnight.

Building a relentlessly relevant brand begins with adopting a customer-obsessed mindset. Being customer-obsessed requires a pervasive focus on not just what customers want, but brands must also gain a greater customer understanding, and especially, empathy for what is important in customers’ whole lives, not just the narrow slice where brands interact with them. It is with this view that a brand can make itself relevant in the moments that matter.

Three Simple Steps to Customer Obsession

1. See your customers as people, not transactions.

Most marketers approach customer insights by asking, “What will it take to get our customers to buy more?” They are using a transactional lens, making their focus too narrow. They are listening to customers but not really hearing what’s important: what customers are saying to each other online, on social media, in reviews and in context with the greater world around them. This leaves most companies deaf to the deeper conversations that can reveal opportunities to build true and profound relevance with their customers. Marketers need to understand a complete view of their customers’ world in order to gain more attention, intention, and engagement.

Marketing agility will be a term you will hear often over the next few years, forcing marketers to move from broad to focused and back again, allowing them to truly understand the whole customer, and giving them the power to inspire breakthrough innovation rather than incremental progress.

Let’s take Netflix, for example. This brand has reshaped its category by embracing customer obsession and becoming an indispensable part of customers’ lives in 50 countries with nearly 33.3 million subscribers worldwide, according to Statista. Netflix built its success on developing a keen sense of what people love to watch and how they love to watch it. The micro understanding of customers is delivered through hyper-personalization and recommendations based on behavioral algorithms.

Customer obsession allowed Netflix to create the category breakthroughs that traditional media never thought was possible. Unlike traditional media, Netflix understood its customers’ hunger to binge-watch new TV series and pivoted its content release strategy. It wasn’t long before HBO, Amazon and Hulu followed suit.

2. Seek common ground and shared interests with customers.

Most marketers approach brand building by asking, “How can we differentiate from our competitors?” Customer-obsessed marketers understand that brands have the power to create deeper connections and motivations by finding common ground – shared interests between what matters in their customers’ lives and what they do as a company.

Facing a heavy-hitting competitive set, GoPro set out to be an adventurous lifestyle brand that made technology products, rather than a tech company marketing to athletes. It created products specifically designed to equip adrenaline junkies for whom the sharing of their stories from adventures in surfing, snowboarding, sky-diving and auto racing was almost as important as doing them. GoPro ignited its customers’ desire to capture their own epic feats and bring family and friends along for the ride.

With user-generated content pouring in, the customers themselves became the marketing engine to build the brand. And it worked: The company increased its marketing cost by only $41,000 in 2013 but made $28 million more in net income than it did in 2012.

3. Embrace the change your customers demand.

Most marketers ask, “How can we sell customers what we’ve got today?” Customer-obsessed brands welcome change because they understand maintaining relevance means thinking dynamically and staying nimble to anticipate customer demand. Customer-obsessed marketers seek to anticipate where the puck is heading by asking, “What will our customers be looking for next, and how can we deliver?”

Customers’ needs and attitudes will inevitably shift, and competitors will attempt to emulate other brands’ success. Customer-obsessed brands anticipate the need for change by more actively sensing what is changing in what customers value. This obsessed focus on what’s changing in customers’ attitudes will allow brands to lean forward and act with an agile mindset, ahead of their competition.

LEGO’s focus on being customer-obsessed has enabled it to continue building relevance by imagining new possibilities for kids and their parents. Dubbed “the Apple of toys” by Fast Company, the Danish toy company knows a lot about the future of play. LEGO’s Future Lab analyzes massive amounts of global data and conducts deep ethnographic research to understand what’s next. Its diverse product portfolio has grown to keep builders engaged as they grow.

When LEGO faced increasing competition from digital entertainment, it successfully partnered with Harry Potter, Star Wars and Ninjago to keep customers engaged. LEGO puts customers at the helm of their own innovation with LEGO Ideas–an online community that invites builders to submit their own ideas for the next LEGO set. The community votes to pick their favorites and LEGO selects winners to create actual products, giving the inventor a portion of sales. With storylines, characters and humor that entertains kids and adults alike, LEGO proves when it comes to creative play, their brand will be relentlessly relevant.

Being customer-obsessed requires a pervasive focus on not just what customers want, but brands must also gain a greater customer understanding, and especially, empathy for what is important in customers’ whole lives, not just the narrow slice where brands interact with them.

This post originally appeared on CMO.com.

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