What is consumerisation?

Many purchasing decisions today begin on a smartphone or a laptop. Whether you’re buying a pair of shoes or booking a holiday, you go online to compare options, read reviews, or find recommendations. Within minutes, you may find yourself clicking the “add to cart” button.

Scenarios like this, with easy access to information and buying options at your fingertips, have set a standard for what is considered a good customer experience. This standard now guides expectations and behaviours more broadly, including in public services and healthcare. This development is often referred to as “consumerisation”, describing a shift from people being passive recipients to active, often opinionated consumers.

In earlier, less technology-powered times, things were different. You would go to the store without a specific product in mind, and the shop assistant would help you navigate the selection. The DJ would decide the playlist. Your doctor would determine your prescription.

Today, we still listen to experts, but we have become used to being in control. We find our own way of navigating information from multiple sources, and we have less trust in experts. We have less trust in experts. In fact, we like to choose our own experts, and when to listen to them. Sometimes this pattern is further reinforced through commercial incentives. The specialised shop is now closed, and the assistant in the new mega store will Google your questions, so why not just do it yourself and have the goods delivered to your doorstep?

Example: Healthcare and pharmaceuticals

Within healthcare, current consumer behaviour entails doing your own research before seeing a doctor: Reading articles, watching influencer videos, joining discussion fora, and, as of late, describing symptoms to a chatbot in attempts to self-diagnose. Consequently, patients show up to their first visit at the doctor’s office, already with a treatment in mind, sometimes even requesting a specific product.

Other consumerisation tendencies include the rise of telehealth platforms which provide online prescription renewals and easy access to over-the-counter drugs. With easier access, consumers are also able to use a drug in ways which go beyond what was intended by the manufacturer, or how a doctor would use it.

Instead of disease management, consumers may use the drug for prevention or try to optimise health by improving certain biomarkers which are now easily available through different tech providers.

Wider implications

In some markets, consumerisation has been a driving force for quite some time, but it is spreading across industries and domains – from fast-moving consumer goods to highly specialised business-to-business industries. This creates new opportunities, but it also introduces risks and tensions.

Increased transparency

With easier access to information, consumers are less restricted by gatekeepers, and they can typically find competing purchase options. This gives consumers a lot of decision-making power, and it puts pressure on companies to be more transparent.

Companies need to explain exactly what consumers can expect from their products and services, and they need to account for pricing structures, environmental footprint, etc. If they choose not to, they may be scrutinised anyway, and reactions to broken promises and poor customer experiences quickly find their way online.

Growing inequality

Consumerisation is generally empowering consumers. However, as is often the case with power, it is not distributed equally. Consumerisation tends to favour those who have the time, financial resources, digital access, and literacy to navigate an increasingly complex landscape of choices.

Information is more widely available than before, but access to information is not the same as the ability to interpret it. Distinguishing reliable evidence from misinformation, recognising bias, and making informed decisions require skills that are unevenly distributed across the population.

As a result, consumerisation can widen existing inequalities, enabling some consumers to make better choices, while leaving others more vulnerable to poor advice and manipulation. This is particularly problematic within areas such as healthcare and public services.

Preference and short-termism over expertise

Consumerisation gives individuals greater freedom to make their own choices, but it can also reduce expert advice. It does not take much online research to see that experts can disagree, but it does take some effort and literacy to assess the merits of expertise and arguments.

So many people end up trusting experts and messages which confirm their existing beliefs and preferences or offer the most convenient solution. An element of this is time-to-gratification, and consumerisation tends to reward products and services that promise quicker, easier, or more visible results, often chosen over competing offerings whose benefits are mainly realised in the long term.

How businesses navigate consumerisation

There is no single solution to winning the consumerisation game, but with the mentioned tendencies in mind, we can share a few perspectives and best practices.

Plan for faster innovation cycles

Consumerisation often comes with high expectations towards convenience and personalised experiences, and companies are under pressure to innovate and continuously renew their offerings.

This needs to factor in the preference-vs-expertise dynamic, and the challenge is: Consumers may not have the expertise to know exactly what the best choice is for them. Companies cannot count on asking consumers what they want, but they can often count on the fact that some consumers make their voices heard if they have had a particularly good or bad experience. Companies need to find ways to monitor customer experiences and engage in faster innovation cycles through trial and error.

Design to fix the weakest link

When it comes to designing products and services, rather than raising the bar on technological innovation, it may be worthwhile focusing on the weakest link in the customer journey.

A new loudspeaker may have the perfect sound but can be a dealbreaker if it is difficult to deliver, cumbersome to install, or doesn’t look good in the living room. A camera may produce quality images, but many consumers prefer to take photos with their smartphone because it is always within reach, automatically backs up photos, and lets them edit and share instantly.

Own the customer journey

Consumerisation goes beyond product design, and companies compete through shaping the customer journey surrounding it. They map out critical touchpoints and identify how to sway decisions.

This may be through releasing information to influence a particular topic, or through owning or partnering with the platforms on which final purchases or subscription renewals are made.

For example, the music streaming platform Spotify works as an all-in-one experience. This is where you experience the main product, pay, and discover new music through recommendations and playlists. Because Spotify controls them, it can influence which artists and genres users are exposed to, shaping listening habits over time.

Similarly, online marketplaces such as Amazon combine product discovery, reviews, recommendations, payment, and delivery tracking, all at the consumers’ fingertips. When consumers stay on the same platform throughout the customer journey, Amazon gets to shape consumer preferences by managing the choices they are presented with.

Control the narrative

A key part of the customer journey lies at the first stage, where consumers seek information, while companies work to exert influence. An early version of this was search engine optimisation, but today, this does not suffice. For many consumers, the standard Google search is replaced by Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, etc.

Many companies now partner with, or “educate” (as they would call it), influencers whose content ranges from a simple endorsement of a body scrub to sophisticated discussions of clinical data. Some companies are also looking at large language models like ChatGPT to add their products to the conversation.

Cultivate an enterprise mindset

When companies work across the customer journey and with a broader understanding of the consumer experience, they are working in areas outside what they originally set out to do.

Whether this new work is done in-house or through external partnerships, folding it into the enterprise will create situations in which groups of professionals hold different perspectives on the company’s purpose and different standards for what constitutes quality work.

Scientists and engineers may want to improve product features, while the marketing team is convinced that the main commercial levers are price, packaging and delivery service. These types of conflicts date back long before consumerisation, but with the consumer voice added to the mix, this becomes more complicated.

As the number of data points increases, some data show consumer preferences which go against expert consensus, in marketing as well as science. Processing the data becomes a negotiation. With the addition of new classes of experts, and potential conflicts across siloes, it becomes as important as ever to cultivate an enterprise mindset.

With this in mind, we believe that it becomes more important than ever to cultivate an enterprise mindset. Having an enterprise mindset means understanding what drives decisions at the enterprise level, and how decisions have downstream effects throughout the value chain. Part of this includes cultivating an environment that supports open and informed discussions between different classes of experts. This could be discussions about when to respond to consumer trends, and when to – counter the trend – trust the experts.

A few final takeaways

Consumerisation will continue to grow and seep into even more industries, and companies may benefit from getting ahead of the trends in their market. It marks a shift in how consumers make decisions, including both how they seek information and how their preferences are shaped by the design of different touchpoints in the customer journey.

Consumerisation also shifts how businesses create value. Quite often, the shift moves away from optimising for quality and superior product features, and towards optimising for a subjectively pleasant customer experience. Lastly, it calls experts and the whole concept of expertise into question. Companies need to manage an open dialogue that incorporates expert input and consumer data, as the best way forward may lie somewhere in between.