Customer
of the Future

How we met Dawn

Anticipating the future is perhaps the most challenging and bold endeavor.

Artificial intelligence, automation, virtual reality, genomics, distributed ledger and other technologies are coming at us at an accelerated pace. With them have come fundamental questions upon which the future of businesses will rest. Where will people give over control to machines? How will business designs need to change? What will tomorrow’s basis of competition be?

In response, Lippincott has carried out a breadth of work across industries that looks over the horizon to provide a more vivid picture of the change ahead. Customer of the Future reflects learnings from our work — in automotive, retail, healthcare, banking, insurance and consumer goods — anticipating how customer needs will change, and how our clients’ strategies and business models must respond.

We unearthed six fundamental shifts shaping the customer of the future, or in our case fictional Dawn, by researching and synthesizing the findings from two primary inputs:

• A proprietary database of innovative business designs: We built and analyzed a database of pioneering businesses disrupting how we live our lives. As the database grows, we continue to study the technologies these businesses have been developed on, the effectiveness of their new value propositions, and the novel business designs and profit models that are emerging.

• An ongoing study of the behavior of thousands of leading edge consumers: We built panels of early adopters and influencers across North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa, looking for clues as to how their attitudes, desires and behaviors are evolving in the face of change.

For any given industry, the insights we’ve gleaned can address very specific questions. But we are also seeing much bigger patterns emerge. Dawn’s story is not about any specific technology. It is the story about what happens when technological trends meet human truths.

We hope you enjoy it.

Rick Wise
Chief Executive Officer
Lippincott