Lifecycle, life stage strategy… are we doing it all wrong?

It’s been a week of coincidences. I found myself on the South bank of the Thames twice in a week which NEVER happens because my only reason to hit the South Bank is to go to the Tate Modern (North London girl forever). But go south I did and also I found myself talking and thinking about customer lifecycle and customer life stage strategies twice in the same week.

Now, I don’t deal in CLM in my day to day work, CX and digital product design are more journey-centric than lifecycle-centric, but if you think about it, they’re both ways to introduce linearity in the way we think about interacting with customers. We do lifecycle management so we can have a straight pathway from when we acquire a customer until they exit, and we do journey management so we can delude ourselves (wry smile) that people take a predictable way to navigate digital ecosystems. Layer on top of that the idea that you can also market to people on a life stage pattern, meaning according to preset stages in their ENTIRE LIFE and it all starts to unravel.

Why? Well, mainly because in journey mapping we have hard data that people never take a straighforward journey through anything and it’s only our obsession with order and the fact that we blow up pathways to persona- level or to segment-level data that enables us to describe a journey anyway. Individual people do not take a predictably straight journey through any digital ecosystem. We just use data to create that impression in charts.

It’s the same with lifecycle management, at an individual level there are always differences and it’s only by blowing up to a big picture level that we can draw general conclusions about how long people engage with a company and what we can do to manage those stages.

[Digression] Interestingly, the wider promise of Big Data has always been that the more data we have and the more automation we can inject in our processes, the better the experience and relationships we can offer to customers. IMHO, that’s remains to be realised and we can only blame data quality and failed company structures for our inability to do the right thing for so long. But that’s a different article and this detour is only to say that we’re not doing great at what used to be simple lifecycles and simple life stages, so I wonder how we’ll do when we start thinking about what brand relationships and life stages start to look like in 2025]

The whole attempt to make something that’s messy into a linear process becomes worse when we start talking about life cycle strategies, the idea that you can put people in categories that are so big and so neat that they describe an entire life.

Going to university, dating, getting married, having kids, buying a house. These are traditional taxonomies that we talk about like they still make sense in 2025 for more than a handful of people. Yet, we have unmistakeable signs that those categories no longer hold or — if they hold, they hold within attributes that make it unmanageable to try to address the category with the same approaches as before.

Examples are aplenty: from macro ones like the number of nuclear, married families in the world, the percentage of single vs married vs co-parenting families, the number of people getting degrees and the age they get them at, the number of jobs in a lifetime, time spent with a company, home ownership, car ownership, number of babies, whether parenting is about human babies or pets, all of these are categories which are fundamentally different today than they were 20–50 years ago.

There’s a mind-blowing article in the October LRB which speaks to how Chinese young people choose to think about their lives. It quotes research on Gen Z which states that this generation is less likely to hold on to jobs, more likely to expect to be promoted within unreasonable deadlines (5 years after entry direct to management position) and will quit easily if not given the right perks. Mid-career crisis, which for former generations happened in their 40s, happens in late 20s for Gen Z with most of them having a median of 6–8 jobs by the time they hit 30.

House ownership has changed dramatically, with the average age of 1st purchase going up and more people living with their parents or relatives than ever before. Size of homes and where the homes are is vastly different from what used to happen in our parents generation. People live in progressively smaller homes with an entire tiny home generation existing on both the US and Europe. House sharing, “flat mating” until you’re 40 is not unusual.

The shape of money making has changed as well; side hustles and investing money in crypto or keeping two jobs (known and the 9–5 after your 9–5) are rampant with people in their 20s/30s. A recent Insta influencer was discussing data which shows that it’s quite likely that start-ups in Sand Francisco have adopted the Chinese approach to work which is known as 996 (working from 9 am to 9 pm for 6 days/ week). Let’s not touch on the fact that hybrid work has become the norm, despite pressures to return to office, and the rate of home office purchases has skyrocketed (think about Ikea 6 years ago and tell me if they had a Home Office category on their website; they didn’t).

What does this mean?

It means that traditional customer life stage strategies are f**ked (excuse my French) and lifecycle management needs to be fluid and structured at the same time. It also, fundamentally, means that we need to shift how we think about customer relationships from the layer of marketing and experience deep down into product and proposition.

[Digression for the sake of example] Consider this: I bough a house when I was 45 and I was offered life insurance in case something happened to me so my family could be taken care of and the mortgage paid. What the hell is that? That, my friends, is what you told a 25 yo Boomer who had just got married and had a child on the way and had just put a downpayment on their first house. What if you die, Brad, who will pay the mortgage because Sally, your wife, is at home taking care of little Mary? I had to laugh at the insurance guy and say do you have something for a 45 yo women who’s bought her second home, is taking a solo mortgage, lives in a civil partnership and has no kids. He had no options for me.

The new customer life stage strategy has 3 steps:

1. Get a clue that your customers are not the people you see in old American movies. Nobody lives like that anymore despite maybe aspiring to do so (nod to Trad Wives of TikTok). The Internet and the Stock Market have, not in that order, fundamentally changed how we exist.
2. Create propositions that meet the way people actually evolve and meet them where they are. Stop trying to sell Gen Z products shaped for their parents.
3. Make it easy for your company to change stuff in how you deliver experience and CLM. Meaning: a) if you collect data, structure it so it’s easily analysed; b) start building your algorithms and automating the resulting interactions c) make everything micro-service-based (headless, componentised, reusable)

I will end on this (and preface another article I am thinking of right now): we hear every year that customers are changing and companies struggle to keep up with them and we do nothing about it. We are now in a place where the changes are so deep and systemic that it’s no longer enough to tweak the interfaces, we need to go into the bowels of how organisations think about what they deliver and change that from the foundation. The reason start-ups change economies so fundamentally is that they take the ways in which people live seriously and they act on it. It’s what my employer used to call “life centricity” and I scoffed at that for a while but now I don’t anymore. Life as we know it IS different. Customer strategies need to follow suit.