The Customer Focus Trap
The dangers of excessive customer ‘centricity’
Once upon a time marketing was product-centric, supporting mass production, focusing on features & benefits, and aiming at media optimisation to push one-way messages to the market through isolated channels. Then came ‘new’ marketing, customer-centric, focusing on the total customer experience (as in ‘shopping experience’ – the way one enjoys shopping) and aiming at on customer optimisation (reach them one-to-one, at the right time) via two-way, interactive communication through integrated and synchronized channels (think, as an example, of Google ads and blogs).
In plain English: traditional product-centric marketing is about bombarding everybody with print or TV ads that glorify the product and its benefits (why customers are satisfied). New marketing addresses selected classes of people (ideally, selected individuals) with selling arguments revolving around the total experience, style, value, prestige, perception and so on.
Traditional marketing is reason, logic, matter, hard things. New marketing is rather emotions, intuition, mind, soft stuff. The main difference between the two systems (that ‘happily’ coexist in today’s business environment) is, I think, the ‘role’ of the customer. In traditional marketing, the customer is, like the ‘end user’ of IT systems, a fuzzy entity at the end of the supply chain. In new marketing, the customer is king, the centre of the system, the alpha and omega, the person who has to be delighted in all circumstances and … religiously listened to.
We all like to be cajoled, delighted and, especially, listened to; and companies that are good at that tend to be very successful. However, ‘religious’ listening to customers creates a big risk: stifling radical, disruptive innovation and condemning the ‘holy’ customer to lacklustre incremental improvements.
In the early 1980s, if you had asked early PC users what their requirements were, they would probably have answered “better operating system software, larger disks, faster processors and so on”. Nobody would have described anything close to the Apple Macintosh with mouse, graphic display, overlapping windows, pull-down menus, cut & paste, drag & drop and so on. Today, PCs would be blazing hot fast boxes that specialists use to run amazingly complex and powerful programmes with commands like /OPEN, /RUN, /ABORT, etc. And the Internet would be used by only a handful of [rocket] scientists.
There is a quotation that haunts me: “Don’t talk too much to your customers because they’ll end up getting what they want, not what they need”. A friend told me that it came from a famous Italian coachbuilder but even Google can’t help me find its source. (Feedback on who actually said that is truly welcome.)
In other words, customers think incrementally. They can rarely dream of and conceive disruptive technologies. So, if you design new products or services, your challenge is to balance an intense focus on customers with an open mind about other sources for new ideas. Scan research laboratories where the technologies for the next decade already exist. Engage your brain into lateral thinking by adopting radically different points of view. And - when the concept is ripe -gather a team of pioneers to plant the seeds of what could become the next new, highly successful business model. Customers can’t be always right, can they?
Once upon a time marketing was product-centric, supporting mass production, focusing on features & benefits, and aiming at media optimisation to push one-way messages to the market through isolated channels. Then came ‘new’ marketing, customer-centric, focusing on the total customer experience (as in ‘shopping experience’ – the way one enjoys shopping) and aiming at on customer optimisation (reach them one-to-one, at the right time) via two-way, interactive communication through integrated and synchronized channels (think, as an example, of Google ads and blogs).
In plain English: traditional product-centric marketing is about bombarding everybody with print or TV ads that glorify the product and its benefits (why customers are satisfied). New marketing addresses selected classes of people (ideally, selected individuals) with selling arguments revolving around the total experience, style, value, prestige, perception and so on.
Traditional marketing is reason, logic, matter, hard things. New marketing is rather emotions, intuition, mind, soft stuff. The main difference between the two systems (that ‘happily’ coexist in today’s business environment) is, I think, the ‘role’ of the customer. In traditional marketing, the customer is, like the ‘end user’ of IT systems, a fuzzy entity at the end of the supply chain. In new marketing, the customer is king, the centre of the system, the alpha and omega, the person who has to be delighted in all circumstances and … religiously listened to.
We all like to be cajoled, delighted and, especially, listened to; and companies that are good at that tend to be very successful. However, ‘religious’ listening to customers creates a big risk: stifling radical, disruptive innovation and condemning the ‘holy’ customer to lacklustre incremental improvements.
In the early 1980s, if you had asked early PC users what their requirements were, they would probably have answered “better operating system software, larger disks, faster processors and so on”. Nobody would have described anything close to the Apple Macintosh with mouse, graphic display, overlapping windows, pull-down menus, cut & paste, drag & drop and so on. Today, PCs would be blazing hot fast boxes that specialists use to run amazingly complex and powerful programmes with commands like /OPEN, /RUN, /ABORT, etc. And the Internet would be used by only a handful of [rocket] scientists.
There is a quotation that haunts me: “Don’t talk too much to your customers because they’ll end up getting what they want, not what they need”. A friend told me that it came from a famous Italian coachbuilder but even Google can’t help me find its source. (Feedback on who actually said that is truly welcome.)
In other words, customers think incrementally. They can rarely dream of and conceive disruptive technologies. So, if you design new products or services, your challenge is to balance an intense focus on customers with an open mind about other sources for new ideas. Scan research laboratories where the technologies for the next decade already exist. Engage your brain into lateral thinking by adopting radically different points of view. And - when the concept is ripe -gather a team of pioneers to plant the seeds of what could become the next new, highly successful business model. Customers can’t be always right, can they?
Henri Aebischer
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