Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage (Wharton Executive Essentials) by Peter Fader

Author:Peter Fader
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: BUSINESS & ECONOMICS
Publisher: Wharton Digital Press
Published: 2012-05-14T14:00:00+00:00

What kinds of firms are more likely to grow via brand equity?

What kinds of firms are more likely to grow via customer equity?

I often pose these questions to executives, managers, and other front-line practitioners through my work with Wharton Executive Education, not to mention my students in the Wharton MBA program. In the years I’ve put them out for discussion, I’ve been impressed, confused, surprised, and sometimes downright perplexed by the responses I’ve received. While the answers often make clear that customer centricity can often be a difficult topic to tackle, they also generate great discussion, foster interesting insights-and most notably, reinforce my belief that for some companies, it is absolutely inexcusable not to be moving forward in a customer-centric manner.

And for others? Well, for others, product centricity might actually be the safest course of action.

The answers to the first question are generally both predictable and absolutely on target, as product-centric powerhouse as Coca-Cola and Apple are overwhelmingly tabbed as companies that could rightly claim enormous brand equity as a major source of value and a principal asset for future growth. As we’ve already discussed, both of these highly successful firms live firmly in the product-centric world. They thrive in a product-centric world. They are powered by brand and product. They may value their customers, but it’s unclear whether they really care about those customers’ values. And to be honest, it’s hard to blame them. They’re doing just fine.

As for that second question? Well, the answers are decidedly more muddled. In many discussions over the years, I’ve heard cable giant Comcast named as a potentially customer-equity-rich firm. Not a bad answer. American Express (a good choice) and American Airlines (also a good choice) have been selected as well. Universities have been said to hold great customer-equity potential (possibly). And of course, so has Apple-which as you might imagine has caused me no small amount of consternation. In other words, when it comes to identifying potentially customer-equity-rich firms, there is hardly a consensus, either in the real world or in academia.

I find the general confusion downright unsurprising. Again, customer centricity operates on the fringe, and as a result, there just aren’t many obvious icons of customer centricity out there today; we certainly don’t yet have an Apple of customer centricity. There just isn’t a firm that has perfected this art to the point where it is a paragon for all others. At least not yet. Tesco is an excellent candidate for this honor, but its name doesn’t come up very often. Maybe Amazon. But neither of them has the same global visibility for their customer-centric efforts as Coca-Cola and Apple have for their brands.

Which brings me to my point. Although even experts in the field have yet to come to consensus on the standout customer-equity-rich firm, there is a general agreement on the vast potential of customer equity for certain markets and certain industries; by extension, there is also some agreement that some markets still exist in which customer centricity might not actually be of much use.

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