Why Would A B2B Company Build A B2C App?
Managing Director, Olam International, plays a lead role in the company's initiative to reimagine global agriculture and food systems. Its a question worth answering because it can help a company see its existing business in a new light, reenergizing both its processes and its people as well as prompting insights into entirely new businesses. Its also not easy to do, as management pioneer Clayton Christensen noted when he researched the ways large companies often stayed focused on their existing business and miss the opportunities for disruptive innovation. One of our recent responses to that challenge was to build a B2C smartphone app called Adva, which lets people track their carbon footprints and uses gamified experiences to encourage and reward more sustainable lifestyles. Were currently testing it with consumers in Singapore. Other B2Bs could benefit from doing something similar. Here are three ways projects like this can disrupt your companys thinking:  1. Think differently about collecting and using data. Like most large B2Bs, weve established ways of using data in support of our operations, much of it targeted at informed users and very specific use cases: For instance, our supply chain platform collates over two million data inputs and provides more than 150 sustainability metrics. But imagining a consumer-facing app is a new way to think about how we approach data. Looking through a B2C lens allowed us to experiment with ideas that might inform or change the proven truths of our B2B practices. 2. Disrupt user experience. A generic B2B value proposition is based on meeting tangible needs with products and services measured in tolerances, ingredients, weights and other objective criteria, and this is also true for the technologies built to support it. Thinking about a B2C app is a wholly undiscovered country populated with users who make purchase decisions based on subjective opinion and feeling; they need to be engaged before theyll consider transacting. Truly reimagining U/I is something that cant emerge iteratively from existing development work. 3. Find new ways to help explore your companys purpose. Large B2B companies have an important role to play in addressing issues like global climate change, in large part because of the impact of our operations. For us, that means reimagining global agriculture and food systems. But that operational focus limits how B2B companies think about purpose, too. Asking such a question, even before answering it, is a healthy exercise for any B2B business. As a result, Adva looks and acts very differently than anything weve built for our customers and partners, and it reveals potential new thinking for any B2B company to consider:   Personalization. Unlike use-specific apps common in B2B, users are greeted by a home screen that lets them personalize location and various behavioral attributes. This is intended to make the app theirs instead of ours.  Tasks. A key leverage point for B2B apps is to provide actionable data, not just nice to have info, so were experimenting with presenting Adva users with small acts that change their current habits to more sustainable ones.  Plans. Providing context for decision-making is a difficult challenge in any app interface. Users are encouraged to collect their desired actions into activity plans which then tee-up carbon emissions saved and award points for achieving them.  Challenges. This is perhaps the most exciting aspect of innovating a B2C app, as learning how to inspire people to use it could have direct implications for how we envision B2B app engagement in the future. Were already learning more about user behavioral dynamics that we can apply back to the technology driving our B2B customer interactions. Further, now that weve opened up our thinking to the possibilities of a B2C app experience, we can see real business opportunities for it, too, such as providing it as a white label engine for companies to use with their employees to encourage sustainability action or offering it as a stand-alone branded marketplace where people can manage their purchases of sustainability-related products and services. Seen in these contexts, Adva is already a success because it has challenged us to disrupt how we think and act. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives.