Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

CHAPTER 3
Profile: Adaptive Lab founder says CEOs 
struggle to act on new technology threats
Newspapers are struggling, taxi ranks are being 
replaced by Uber drivers and the hotel industry has 
been rattled by Airbnb. Yet, getting businesses to 
adapt quickly to embrace and compete with disrup-
tive technologies can be surprisingly difficult.
James Haycock, managing director and founder of 
Adaptive Lab, set up the London-based consultancy 
in 2009 to help businesses adjust to new technology 
and the accompanying shifts in customer behaviour 
and regulation.
‘The chief executives of these companies are 
waking up terrified that they are going to be eaten 
up by disruptive technologies,’ says Mr Haycock. 
‘But for all the meetings they hold, they actually 
struggle to act. We try to package the new ways of 
working used by start-ups and take them to larger 
businesses. The idea of experimentation is really 
important to us.’
He points to Airbnb, the room-sharing service, 
as an example of good practice. Its founders slept in 
some of their clients’ houses to get first-hand experi-
ence of the service they were offering.
‘There’s a lot of talk in business about being 
customer-obsessed and prioritising decisions about 
what customers need, but in fact in many cases the 
actual priority is to deliver to shareholders. We try 
to get them to address how they can better serve cus-
tomer needs and put themselves in their shoes,’ says 
Mr Haycock.
The firm was ‘frequently recommended’ by clients 
and peers in the digital transformation category of 
the UK’s Leading Management Consultants, com-
piled by the FT and Statista, and ‘recommended’ in 
the financial institutions and services sector.
One of Adaptive Lab’s main findings was that cus-
tomers did not always want additional programmes, 
they simply wanted existing services to function as 
they should.
‘When we worked with credit card companies, 
we brought in customer research,’ Mr Haycock 
says. ‘We found out that customers didn’t want 
value-added programmes – they just wanted the 
corporate credit card programme to work properly,’ 
he adds.
He points to a brand called Smarty, created for 
Three, the mobile phone company, after its research 
found customers wanted greater simplicity and 
transparency of contracts – ‘a very simple and 
straightforward plan’. The phone service provides 
discounts to customers who do not use up all their 
data.