Marketing, customer experience, and digital leaders in consumer-facing businesses are navigating new ways that the world now works — but you can’t let the shifting winds and heavy currents push your business off course. In Forrester’s new report, “Consumer Marketing, CX, And Digital Leaders: How To Thrive Through Volatility (US)” (client-only access), we outline strategies and tactics to navigate rapidly evolving economic and market conditions. Following are highlights of Forrester’s advice to consumer brand leaders in CX, marketing, and digital business.
Your customer is your pivot point for planning, action, and communication.
Customer obsession is the surest way to business success in any operating environment — not being customer obsessed will tangibly cost your organization. That’s because customer obsession is vital to making good decisions about your strategy, product, service, and ways of operating to grow the business amid any type of turbulence. Among other strategies and tactics:
- Reaffirm your customers, their needs, and how you operate to fulfill them. Build segmentation and good personas and ensure that they’re connected to business goals. Find your value sweet spot — the blend of the four value dimensions (functional, experiential, symbolic, and economic) — that delivers on your target customers’ value needs, matches what your organization excels at, and provides a competitive advantage.
- Create an authentic, actionable CX vision — and land quick, inexpensive wins. Tight budgets, shifting priorities, and small teams? You’ve got this. If you’re a Forrester client, use The Forrester CX Vision Development Template to speed your CX vision review. Focus on filling common gaps in the fundamentals. Use journey mapping to ensure that experiences fulfill the CX vision: map key journeys, keep it low fidelity, and focus on critical pain points. And adopt guerilla CX tactics to make the most of resources such as available (even micro) data and rapid-fire experimentation and learning – and much more.
- Prioritize the types of insights you need for your adaptive marketing strategy. Our data tells us that using customer insights to drive decision-making is among global marketing leaders’ top challenges for 2025. Think long – not just short! – term: for example, will those acquisition tactics and dollars result in customers whom you’re best suited to serve over the long term? (
Flex adaptivity, creativity, communication, leadership, and risk management muscles.
CX, digital, and marketing leaders should lead their teams to collaboratively:
- Create an “always on” planning structure. Work with senior leadership to develop and operationalize a continuous planning loop. Create dynamic roadmaps that: embrace approaches like agile development and design thinking; enable fast and flexible adjustments, including automation technologies; and promote exploration, iteration, and effective measurement.
- Unleash internal creativity. Use the “we’ll try anything” mentality and the fast-changing nature of business to start iterating, testing, and measuring new ideas. Think means to access new markets and customers, new educational materials, or new tools to help your customers navigate through uncertainty.
- Tap generative AI (genAI) for task improvement and effectiveness. With genAI, teams can become more efficient with tasks – and find new ways to tackle challenges. As agentic AI improves and expands, genAI’s role in productivity and creativity will only grow, especially in the hands of people who learn to use the tools well today.
- Ratchet up managing the risks in their control. Know the 3 E-s of risk management: enterprise, ecosystem, and external forces / systemic risks. The rule now: to evaluate risk tradeoffs , you must become ultra-disciplined about risk management via a continuous approach to enterprise risk.
Want to discuss your organization’s next steps? If you’re a Forrester client, please schedule a guidance session or inquiry with us.
Not a Forrester client? Explore our complimentary resources on navigating volatility.