Redefining Retail

4Experiential Benchmarks

Companies once “enjoyed” a landscape where they had only their direct competitors in their shared industry to stand out from—but that time has passed. Today's customers are more demanding than ever, and so companies “need to be better than,” as McKinsey & Company puts it, “the [many] sources of inspiration who are setting the standards for your customer.”¹

Once the bar of expectations of what is an “acceptable” delivery time or a satisfactory return policy gets set by the best‐in‐class players, who are often digital natives, all competitors, including established incumbents, must adapt. If they don't, they are immediately perceived as obsolete and risk being neglected by even the most loyal customers. We call this mechanism “experiential benchmarks.” For example, imagine that a company wants to build a content platform to engage and entertain customers with branded content. The experiential benchmarks they must inevitably consider, beyond their direct competitors, are on‐demand streaming platforms such us Netflix, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube Premium—or Tencent Video, iQiyi, and Youku in China. Customers will expect the same breadth and depth of content, a personalized welcome page, proactive individual recommendations, an impeccable user interface, an efficient search bar, and so on. Delivering a state‐of‐the‐art customer experience is the most important battleground for brands nowadays. Another example is what happened to the once very ...