Sustainable Marketing - Part 3: Products versus Customers

This is the third part of a series on Sustainable Marketing. In this installment we beging the comparison of Traditional Marketing (Product-centric) versus Sustainable Marketing (Customer-centric). Click here to link to the beginning (Part 1) of the series .

There has been much discussion over the last decade about the necessity of moving from a product-centric to a customer-centric approach to business. In the mid-90’s, technology caught up with the concept. Companies like Siebel Systems were launched to capture and share customer interaction data across marketing, sales, call centers, customer support, and a variety of channels.

With the rapid rise of the World Wide Web, customer centricity became an imperative. Marketers quickly lost control of their distribution strategies. Customers had instant access to competitive information like features, packaging, pricing, and discounts. For the first time, they gained the ability to manage their relationships with companies. Customers determined when, where, how, and through which channel they would interact with companies and, as a result, marketers scrambled to define a set of preferred interaction models for each customer segment based on its value to the company.

Despite this flurry of activity, most marketing organizations remain product centric. Companies still organize around product lines and marketing budgets too often follow the corporate organization chart. Developing a customer-centric focus is a journey not a destination. In fact, we typically see companies going through three distinct phases to make this transition, as the following chart illustrates: (note: you may click on the chart to link to a larger version)

From My Pictures

Click here to continue to Part 4 of the Series.