The creative people I admire seem to share many characteristics: A fierce restlessness. Healthy cynicism. A real-world perspective.

An ability to simplify. Restraint. Patience. A genuine balance of confidence and insecurity. And most importantly, humanity.

—David Droga

It's not a bad thing to talk about humanizing digital, to consider it, to kick it around. But to gain the tremendous power that it can unleash in your organization and for your customers and your employees, at some point you need to do more than talk. You need to act. And once you act, you may have to create asituation where there's no going back.

Throughout history, military commanders have used the tactic of burning bridges (or boats) to prevent their troops from retreating—thus increasing their motivation to succeed in battle. With the bridge gone, there was no going back. And that's the thing I think a lot of marketers have a hard time navigating. They often say they want to create a better experience for their customers, but when the going gets tough, they forget all about it and retreat over the bridge—returning to their familiar,tried-and-true ways of doing business.

What we're trying to do, however, is build bridges to something different and then burn down the old ones. That's a hard thing for many people to do. But there is real, measurable value to be gained that can make the difference between a brand that survives and one that doesn't. And this is directly related to your willingness and ability to take technology and use it for a more intimate and relevant contextual experience.

That's what we call human. And I believe that those who get it right are going to be the successful ones in the next 5 to 10 years, while those who keep doing what they're doing on the old islands will be stuck there, and that's a hard lesson to learn.

In the preceding chapters, I have provided you with avariety of tactics and strategies you can readily apply to humanize digital in your organization. Now, I would like to step back and consider the big picture of what you can and should be doing right now. You'll recognize some of these things from earlier in the book, and others appear only in this chapter. In any case, I suggest that this roadmap will help you get where you want to go without having to retreat to the familiar and comfortable island you've been living on for so long.

Three Things

First, if you do nothing else today, take a piece of paper—an index card, a notebook, or fire up your computer—and write down three things you know about your most valuable customer that your competitors do not. Not 10 things, not one thing—three things. That's the best place for anyone to start.

If you can't make a list of just three things, then you've got a problem. It's a sure sign that don't know the customer, you don't know what they're thinking, you don't know what's unique about them, and you don't know what your most valuable customers' trigger points are. Ahead of anything else, this is what you most need to know—and fast.

So what if you can't come up with three things—what then?

Ask yourself, “What are my customers telling me?” It's not just how much data you have, it's what motivates your customers that is truly meaningful? Here's a hypothetical example of Apple. What three things do you think motivate Apple customers the most to keep people buying their products? Using my own family as an example, we've bought somewhere in the neighborhood of six Apple laptops over the past 15 years or so, and we've bought seven or eight Apple iPhones.

Why do we keep coming back?

In the case of laptops, it's not because there aren't capable Windows-based computers—there are. HP, LG, Dell, Asus, and others all make highly reviewed machines. In some cases, they're faster, with larger screens and more memory and storage for a lot less money than the equivalent Apple products. Regardless, we still buy Apple laptops.

And in the case of smartphones, it's not because Samsung, Motorola, Google, and others don't make good products; they do. And it's also not because our cellular service provider, AT&T, prefers that we buy Apple smartphones. They offer a variety of different smartphones to customers that work just fine on the AT&T network. Regardless, we still buy Apple iPhones.

So why do we keep coming back?

It's because Apple's customer experience makes us want to come back. We're motivated by design, and Apple clearly puts a lot of thought, effort, and money into creating great product designs. And Apple's design aesthetic goes far beyond its gorgeous products—it pervades the entire brand and everything it touches. Their creativity is really well thought out, reflecting their design aesthetic, and so are the Apple retail stores.

Whenever I go into an Apple Store, I have the feeling that they're really on top of their game. They greet me at the door, if there's a queue they get me on the waiting list, and I'm welcome to play with their display products while I'm waiting. Apple's salespeople are super knowledgeable, and they have great technical support available via their Genius Bar. While Apple may not have pioneered this kind of customer experience, they for sure now own it. When I step into an Apple Store, I know what to expect and I feel good about it. It hits me emotionally as well as practically.

Think about your own brand for a moment. Does it have the kind of emotional appeal that attracts people and converts them into loyal customers for the long run? What is it about your product—or the way you deliver it—that triggers your loyal customers to stay that way? If you hope to succeed in the long run, you must establish an emotional connection with customers that is very deep.

I have a deep, emotional connection to Apple and its products. The high quality I want is there, and that quality is extended to every touchpoint I've ever engaged with. I therefore don't mind giving Apple my business. In fact, I like doing it. But if in the future they start to deviate too much from what I expect from the brand, or if they disappoint me, then that leaves an opportunity for another company to try to earn my business and my loyalty as a customer. You might be a company that has found the secret to delivering great service, but if you get complacent, then you could find that your customers aren't there any longer.

The Aging Generation

There's a large group of people who are fast becoming one of the key segments for marketers, particularly in technology. I'm not talking about Gen Xers, Millennials, or Gen Zers. The group I'm talking about is the aging population, specifically Boomers and older, and there are enormous opportunities within this group right now.

Think about your own family for a moment and howeveryone has a story about being the IT call center for their mom or dad. We've all experienced that—I know I have. What's driving this is because brands haven't always kept the human in mind when they design and sell and support them. And they definitely haven't kept older people in mind.

Do these people need lots of bells and whistles? No. Do they have trouble hearing, seeing? Yes, they do. It's hard. Older people often can't see what they're supposed to be doing, therefore it's frustrating and it appears they're not technically minded when they really are.

So, when you think about this group in particular, what are the three most valuable things they would be willing to pay for? More than any other group, older people will be willing to pay for products and services that make their lives simpler and easier. You could build a whole system: people would happily pay for the IT service required to keep their smartphone, their laptop, their desktop, and smart devices in their homes—their alarm system, video doorbell, Wi-Fi-enabled thermostat, and so on—working together properly.

Making that really easy for this demographic could pay enormous dividends, but no one seems to be intersecting with that right now. Companies just put their products out there, and if customers need help, they can go find an online manual or maybe their kids will help them out. That to me is the poster child for the lack of human-driven experiences and thinking about the human first.

The Post-COVID Organization

Again, start with the experience, start with the human, start with an understanding that we are all going through this journey and this brief experiment called life. Being able to use technology to make those lives better is the core of purpose. It's not selling more shaving foam or more cars or more Caribbean vacations. It's, “I want to make your life a little easier, a little better. And I want you to know that you matter to me as a customer, and I want you to know that you matter to me as an employee.”

Which brings us back to the fact that humanizing digital doesn't just apply to our customers, but also to our employees and to our organizations. It's our people who also must deal with the digital decisions we've made, and those decisions are often not good ones. When we lose good employees—frustrated or thwarted by the decisions we've made—the destruction of value is incalculable. We must treat our people as humans, not as resources. That's really got to change.

As we deal with the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, we're coming out of a watershed moment during which we've been forced to use technology in ways we've never even considered. When businesses shut down and people started working from home in greatly increased numbers, we used technologyto help keep employees, teams, and entire organizations together—remotely.

While I expect that we will one day return to a semblance of the pre-COVID world that we are still familiar with, we have learned some valuable lessons through the ordeal. We've learned that we can be productive and work together and collaborate and innovate, even when we're not in a room together. Before COVID, most businesspeople thought you had to physically be together in the same room to get important things done. That, of course, is one of the most common and most human feelings we possess—to want to be together. We need and thrive on live social interaction.

So the question is, what's the balance?

There are seminal moments that change the course of history—good, bad, or otherwise—whether it's the result of humans or something else. It could be war, famine, disease, volcanoes, hurricanes, a wayward asteroid—any number of things. Those moments force us to move forward a lot faster than we would normally go as a species. For decades, we'll just cruise along, making incremental changes in terms of what we do. And then suddenly something hits us that we can't ignore, and everything changes, and it changes a lot. COVID-19 caused us to skip forward a lot further and a lot faster than what typically happens in the normal progression of human history.

When the Black Death—bubonic plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis and primarily spread by fleas carried by rodents—ravaged the world during the fourteenth century, an estimated 75 million people died. Like COVID-19, the plague was indiscriminate in the victims it chose. Rich, poor, male, female, young old—Y pestis didn't care. Entire villages were decimated, and populations wiped out. However, the Black Death was especially prevalent in densely populated cities where people with the disease were in close proximity to those who didn't yet have it, and it most often killed people who were already frail or unwell—who had preexisting conditions.

Historians believe that the Black Death had tremendous and long-lasting effects on humanity. With so many deaths, there was a big labor shortage, putting extreme strain on the feudal system of lords (who owned the land) and serfs (who worked the land). To attract and retain laborers, the lords had to improve pay and working conditions for the serfs. Years later, after the Black Death abated and lords tried to roll back these changes, the serfs rebelled—retaining many of their gains. In addition, when people realized that priests and prayers and church services didn't have the power to stop the Black Death, many turned away from religion altogether.¹

The Black Death changed the way we worked, it changed the way we lived, and it changed the way we interacted with one another. And it even changed us physically to a certain degree because people who were genetically stronger and naturally more resistant to the plague bacterium were able to survive and pass on their genes to their children, who were then able to pass on their genes to their children. Society as a whole movedforward much faster after the Black Death than it had in the years preceding it.

I think this is the kind of moment we're experiencing today, when things just slip forward a lot faster than we ever imagined possible. We all thought, sure, online commerce—Amazon and all the rest—is going to be the thing that we gravitate toward. Little did we know that it was not going to just be a B2C thing, but it was going to be a B2B thing. Everybody's expecting that sort of model of being able to get something without requiring a lot of effort and “administrivia.” They're all expecting the same experience, and that has opened up new opportunities that didn't exist even a few years ago.

Big-box retailers were putting thousands of mom-and-pop shops out of business, but now it's coming full circle. Smaller, more agile businesses are gaining ground as they adapt and apply technology very quickly using minimal resources. You don't have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to put out a shingle and start getting business—you can do that overnight. And it also opens up the desire, because we have taken all the commoditized stuff that we don't like doing, and it's given us this new dimension where you can do things like pick up your groceries at the store without getting out of your car—“Just put it in the back, I don't want to even talk to anyone.”

There's a greater focus in my view, and there will continue to be a greater focus in my view, on better experiences when we do get together. And I believe that is true, not only in terms of being together with customers but also in terms of being together with your employees and with your colleagues. The game has slipped forward to the point where you'd better bring along more interesting elements, because when you do get together, it's got to be really high quality. Says Peter Smith:

Your company's growth comes down to how good of an experience you can create, and I think that companies for a long time have talked about things like personalization in very handwavy terms. They don't get into what's driving us, what's motivating us, what our purpose is in searching for a particular product.

My mom was trying to buy a laptop from a large online computer retailer. She went to their website, saw something she liked, and clicked on the listing. That click took her into the product detail page where she was presented with basically a parts catalog of dropdowns to select from—like a bunch of pick lists.

“Okay,” she thought to herself, “512 MB, 1 TB, 2 TB, SSD, VME, HDD. I have no idea what to do.” She clicked the information icon a few times to try to get translations for all these techy acronyms and terms, and she tried to engage a chatbot on the site. The net result was she ended up getting frustrated. She didn't feel confident spending $2,000 because this was all just far too complicated for her. She abandoned the transaction.

And how did the computer retailer respond to that? “Let me target her.” They sent her a ton of emails with promotional offers to try to close her. But at no point in that process did they look at the indicator—that she clicked an information icon three or four times and tried to engage a chatbot—and deduce that she wanted more information to get comfortable about her purchase. She wasn't debating whether or not to purchase. She just didn't feel comfortable selecting from those dropdowns.

So even simple things like that, companies do a horrible job today of tapping into the 99.9 percent of data they have available to them to better serve a customer's purpose or intent. Instead, when given the option of picking between relevancy and reach, they're picking reach 100 percent of the time. Just because it's cheap, it's easy, and you can use email templates. But the result is you're not developing a relationship with your consumer, and you're undermining their trust in your brand—their sense that you understand them, and their belief that you actually care about what's best for them as opposed to the next transaction for that company.

We used to come together because we had to come together—let's set up a meeting. I always joke, why are meetings always in half-hour and one-hour increments? Do we really need to set aside that exact amount of time? What usually happens is, when someone sets up a half-hour meeting, we use the time, whether or not we need to. When someone sets up a one-hour meeting, we use the time. But did we use the time effectively? Was it high quality?

I think where we're going to go is toward scoring the quality of time that we're spending together in terms of innovation. We move something, we change something, we make something happen in this half hour or 15 minutes. It was born out of the internet bubble where people wanted to interact and collaborate in different ways than they had been used to in corporate America. And incentivize people to bring creativity into the spotlight. Organizations that can't do that are not going to get and keep great talent. The right talent is going to gravitate toward places where, when we come together and have a meeting, it's great. They come away thinking, “Wow, that was really good.”

We do quality assurance meetings routinely at Accenture. I don't know that I'm particularly good at it, but during a recent meeting, I asked questions that weren't necessarily tactically oriented around a contract per se but on the client, specifically in terms of expectations. I simply asked if the team really understood what the client would consider successful at the end of the day. What was each stakeholder expecting both from the project and on a personal level? One of the people who attended the meeting called me afterward and said, “Hey, that was the best Q&A session I've ever had.”

I couldn't figure out why, because again, I don't think I'm so great at this. But the reason she said that she was happy about it was because she felt as though she got pushed to learn something about the motivations of the client as a human, and then something clicked. I just think that our brains are getting rewired, and the expectation is that we're not just going to do rubber-stamp stuff and “administrivia,” or have a meeting to have another meeting. I think everyone wants to move things forward and feel like they've had impact.

The people element is both a tremendous challenge and opportunity. Steve Jobs once said:

Some people say, “Give the customers what they want,” but that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would've told me, ‘A faster horse!’” People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.

I don't think Jobs meant that you shouldn't listen to your customers because they don't know what they want. Rather, by listening, observing, and learning every day, and by taking note of the challenges, frustrations, and interests that drive us as humans, we might be able to better serve our customers and better anticipate the changing nature of customer needs. The sensitivity to sensing that demand is directly correlated to engaging with customers and employees and shifting the balance of power to better understand what they are telling you.

As Victoria Morrissey explains: “Really listen and say, ‘Let me help you find a way to solve your problem that also benefits the company.’ One of the best pieces of advice I ever got in my life was something my mother said to me many years ago: ‘You have two ears and one mouth, and you should use them proportionately.’”

Organizations that follow this path will build healthy and profitable businesses that are truly of the people, by the people, and for the people. And these businesses will continue to grow and endure for many years to come.