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by Julie Wittes Schlack | March 3, 2015 | 1,051 views
Is yours a customer-centric company? The CMO Council
and SAP recently posed that question to more than 300
senior marketing executives of major corporations. Not
surprisingly, 73% of respondents said customer centricity
is critical to the success of the business and to their own
roles.
Sadly, and equally predictable, was that only 14% said
customer centricity is a hallmark of their company, and
only 11% said they believe that their customers would
agree with that characterization.
In short, the study results echoed those of several major studies in the past few years, which is that
most companies claiming to be "customer-centric" aren't.
Peter Drucker famously noted that "the point of a business is to create a customer." That language
—"create a customer"—might lead to considering customers as inanimate objects or things. But
they aren't vessels serving only as passive repositories for whatever companies want to stuff into
them. Customers are active agents in a dynamic business ecosystem.
That's why the new business imperative is to partner with them throughout the product and service
lifecycle (not just at the end of it) collaborating with them to co-create, refine, and launch high-
impact products and solutions.
But rather than being recognized as the raison
d'être of a business, the consumer is too often
consigned to a single department—market
research—which primarily validates what the
company already thinks it knows. And such
confinement of consumer insight into a virtual
ghetto serves as a drag on growth, hindering
businesses from acquiring, delighting, and
retaining consumers.
Ironically, it's the specialists typically tasked
with representing the consumer's voice—
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market research and consumer insights groups
—who contribute to a consumer-sampled rather
than consumer-infused business culture. Some
of the problem lies in their own reliance on
methods and dogma that are no longer
sustainable, but more of it lies in the conventional corporate view of customers as respondents or
consumers—not partners.
But companies infused with the voice of the customer—those that systematically design the
customer into the company across all functions and divisions, at every phase of the product or
service lifecycle—are more agile, responsive, and able to deliver greater shareholder value over the
long run.
So how do you do that? By recognizing that consumers can (and should) be active collaborators
with every facet of your brand, and then acting on it.
Here are five concrete measures that corporate leadership can take to integrate the consumer into
the company.
1. Start with insights, but don't stop there
Even if your consumer insights team has identified an opportunity for innovation, the consumer
voice all too often ends there, or it's re-enlisted only at the end of the process, when you're ready to
test or validate. Instead...
2. Create common purpose among all stakeholders
Which is what GE does. GE's chief marketing officer, Beth Comstock, systematically bridges the
engineering lab with the real world "lab" of homes, airports, factories, and hospitals through an
initiative called "market back."
The success of the initiative hinges on several key factors:
Developing understanding through immersion and consumer dialogue
Designing solutions for and in partnership with all stakeholders and from the ground up in
local markets (rather than being pushed down from headquarters)
Rapidly implementing by quickly rolling out and testing solutions
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Iterating, using immediate customer feedback
"Global perception and expectation of innovation is changing, and businesses would be short-
sighted not to change with it," Comstock says. "And that means looking at innovation in both the
science lab and the 'real world' lab."
So how do you do that? Mandate that every department—from R&D to Manufacturing, from Finance
to Marketing—engage customers through live workshops, online communities, virtual collaboration
platforms, webcam streams showing in-moment usage, and other interpersonal methods.
It's too easy to dismiss concerns, or cite "user error," when the people to whom everyone in your
company owes their jobs (i.e., customers) become abstract data points on a page. But it's mortifying
and humbling to witness first-hand those same people struggle with your less-than-optimal package
design... or inspiring when customers generate an idea that would materially improve your product
or they demonstrate through the smiles on their faces how it improves their lives.
3. Ask whether you know your customers as well as you know your numbers
Before automatically answering "yes," do a little experiment. Ask yourself who speaks for the
consumer in your organization? Is it Consumer Insights? Market Research? Data Analytics? Social
Marketing? Or is it actual customers? Are there pictures of real customers (not models from stock
photographs) adorning your desk and office walls? And how many actual customers' names do you
know?
Although it's impossible to have a personal relationship with all of your customers, it's entirely
possible (and necessary) to forge relationships with some of them. Relationship—not data points—
nurtures intuition. And in a business climate as dynamic as the current one, corporate leadership
must be able to act quickly, informed as much by sound intuition as sound research.
4. Remember that numbers don't speak for themselves, and data alone doesn't move
people
If you want your consumer insights team to make bold recommendations and stop inundating you
with endless charts, tables, and data points, then don't focus on their methods over their message,
and don't demand statistical significance when it really doesn't matter.
That's not to say there's no longer any place for traditional research rigor. But there's a difference
between "market research"—the attempt to construct optimal feature sets, forecast sales volume,
and use other meaningfully quantified data to measure markets—and consumer collaboration, which
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is an ongoing process of engaging the actual human beings who are your customers in solving
actual problems.
Yes, a graph showing that 76% of respondents found Concept X "somewhat or very consistent" with
your brand may be interesting as you think about potential market share. But if you want to
understand and act on the emotion that drives mind share, more compelling would be video diaries
from real people making real choices between your brand and your competitors', or trying your
product prototypes at home, or marking up your ideas with comments and suggestions.
5. Synthesize and interpret, don't just accrue
Executives often find themselves in the peculiar position of being overwhelmed by data—but lacking
actionable knowledge. In part, that's because there's an emerging counterpoint to the overly
centralized consumer insights or consumer relationship function, and that's the decentralized one.
In a growing number of companies, the problem is not that one department has exclusive
"ownership" of the customer voice but that everyone—the CRM team, the social or digital marketing
team, the customer support team, the data analytics team—does. Everyone is hearing and reacting
to different voices in different ways.
The solution is not to tighten the reins but to build cross-functional accountability for synthesizing
what's being heard.
* * *
Let's end where we started: Creating customers every day is not only essential to growth but also
the reason companies exist in the first place.
But in this emerging sharing economy—modeled on the notion of collaborative creation and
consumption—you can't effectively create customers without a deep, empathetic, and evolving
understanding of their aspirations, challenges, and needs.
Companies can't serve customers without active, ongoing collaboration in developing and refining
products, services, messaging, distribution, and the overall customer experience.
And to achieve that, leaders must ensure that the customer voice is explicitly designed into every
corporate function.

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Julie Wittes Schlack is a founding member and the SVP of innovation and
design of online-community-based consultancy Communispace. A recipient of
the Hopwood Award for fiction, she has been widely published in obscure
literary journals. She reviews books for the Boston Globe.
LinkedIn: Julie Schlack
Twitter: @jwschlack
Tweet 176 17 Share 368
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