Mastering Permanent Transition: A New Fixture In An Ever-Fluid World

Guy Gouldavis is a C-suite leader with deep expertise in integrated strategy. He’s currently Head of Strategy at Vitro, San Diego.

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The start of the year is a time of transition for many of us: going back to work, returning to foods we normally eat and, for some people, embarking on resolutions whose premature end marks another transition. All these transitions are temporary in nature and stand in contrast to a wider cultural shift that is redefining how consumers behave, along with the responses of marketers who want to keep up with them. Welcome to a new era of permanent transition, an emerging dynamic playing out from meta to micro levels with profound implications for marketers, not only for shaping reactive strategies but offering opportunities.

Permanent transition results from life moving faster than it did 20 years ago. The shifting digital states we move through daily are often far more varied and demanding than physical ones:

• Jumping across multiple platforms while interacting with the physical world.

• Juggling conversations across a bewildering ecosystem of apps.

• Balancing relationships and “always-on” work cultures.

All these take place against a backdrop of unpredictable global developments; these states create a crucible in which everyone is endlessly transitioning not just attention but states of feeling and thinking. In a broad sense, permanent transition represents a new fluidity of endless shifts across culture, trends that not only trigger collective movements but are also atomized down to affect the individual moment.

It carries a Darwinian urgency for both business and people to adapt effectively to fit a dynamically changing environment. As a behavioral dynamic, permanent transition confers a competitive advantage to those with an ability to pivot to different mental or emotional states aligning with the situation. To survive in this state, many companies have embraced permanent transition and responded creatively, from evolving business models to expanding digitally, and from e-commerce and converting retail staff to engaging online influencers.

Why does permanent transition matter?

Permanent transitions have already given rise to irreversible change. “Consumers vaulted five years in the adoption of digital in just eight weeks” in 2020, according to McKinsey, while Forrester believes three years of consumer behavior change occurred in the same year. The growth in social commerce in the U.S. has transformed the dynamics of consumer behavior, influence and buying channels. Being able to shop and buy brands without leaving a social platform has become so successful precisely because it reduces transition-related friction for the consumer.

Offline-first leaders like Lego and Disney have transformed into brand ecosystems to secure their foothold in consumers’ ever-fluid digital lives. Beyond building walled-garden ecosystems, brands increasingly need to develop partner ecosystems that meaningfully integrate experience through an interconnected platform to satisfy consumers’ ever-increasing standards of service. As the world moves to end-to-end solutions based on a deep knowledge of the customer, partner-to-partner collaboration will become more important than ever. As an example, Intel has developed such a platform to drive partner growth in a data-centric economy through collaborating with other partners—receiving and managing leads, monitoring business performance and marketing solutions to end customers.

How can marketers make use of permanent transition?

There are a few steps marketers can take to create opportunity or limit the risk from competing in a culture that is permanently transitioning:

Better Business Readiness

The value of permanent transition goes beyond sharpening competitiveness. The entire organization benefits from expecting fluidity and adapting to it earlier. When embraced by the internal culture, a permanent-transition mindset unlocks opportunities sooner by operating in a state of “dynamic stability.”

Better Customer Experience Design

The liminal character of transition culture creates stress in some situations but is a source of excitement in others. Bringing nuanced empathy into the design process and streamlining interaction, minimizing friction and reducing hard transitions will often be rewarded with better engagement.

Better Search And Display Targeting

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) modeling to transition-sensing technology can help enable interruptive marketing that feels more natural and intuitive to be developed. Capturing signals of a person in a liminal state and delivering an effortless experience that fuels their transition in a personal way can yield rich results for any company able to dynamically marshal both historic and in-the-moment data.

Better Ongoing Customer Development

Even satisfied customers can have transient relationships with brands unless given new reasons to stay. In a more fluid world, greater attention should be given to customer strategy. Some aspects like customer segments and the customer journey shouldn’t be so canonized that dynamic opportunities are overlooked.

Final Thoughts

To conclude, permanent transition is a new dynamic deeply embedded in a culture whose character has been defined through the global pandemic despite its antecedents. It permeates life from meta to micro levels and continues to profoundly shape the degree of cohesion that individuals, groups and companies have with their surroundings. Armed with the mindset and some simple strategies, marketers will fare better in the ever-fluid, fast-paced world in which they compete.

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