Now that we understand what product centricity is all about
and we've discussed some of the cracks in product centricity.
And even some of the opportunities from companies to escape from and maybe
do better than a product-centric approach, I
want to start moving away towards customer centricity.
But before I give you a definition and talk it through, I'd like
you to think about what customer centricity
means, based on your experience as well
as what I've discussed so far.
So in order to do that, I want to work with a series of examples here.
In fact, on this slide, you'll see the names of four very famous retailers.
Three of them operate on a global level, so Walmart, Apple, Starbucks.
I'm sure most of you are familiar with them.
And Nordstroms.
A high end very, a high touch department store chain
here in the US.
If you're not familiar with them not a big deal.
I think you'll appreciate the story anyway.
What I'd like you to do is take a moment, and from your experience with, your
perceptions of these firms, decide which of them would be highly customer centric.
So I want you to think about what customer
centricity means in light of our discussion so far.
And decide which of these, could be one,
could be all, could be none, up to you,
would be above the bar in terms of customer centricity.
So think about what customer centricity means, and
which of these firms qualify in that regard.
Think about that for a second.
And then I want to talk through all four of them.
In my book, none of these firms are truly customer centric.
Now, I want to be careful about this.
I have great admiration
for all these firms. I'm a big customer of all of them.
I really like what they do.
But all of them for different reasons.
Fail to be truly customer centric, nearly as much as perhaps some of you thought
when in deciding which of them, which
of these firms are or aren't customer centric.
So I'm just going to take a few moments to talk through each
one of them, and then, finally we'll bring up our definitions of customer centricity.
First there's Walmart.
Now again, Walmart is a terrific firm, but Walmart
knows, surprisingly little about any one of it's customers.
Unlike Harris, unlike Tesco, unlike so many other retailers
out there, Walmart does not have a loyalty program.
Walmart has made very little effort to date to
try to figure out exactly what each customer's doing.
And how they can influence each customer's behavior.
So while Walmart might not make a lot of efforts to understand what any
one customer's going to buy, they make great
efforts to understand the customers as a whole.
They understand regional differences.
They understand when certain kinds of events occur.
For instance, when a hurricane is about to hit the south eastern US,
they need to fill the stores with water and batteries and so on.
So they understand the customer in a
generic way but they make very little effort
to understand the customers in a very specific
granular way as a direct marketer would suggest.
And you know what, that doesn’t bother me
because Walmart isn’t intending to be a direct marketer.
If you think about the Walmart business model, it’s about
selling in great volumes, it’s about bringing the costs way down.
So, in many ways, Walmart is
a prototypical, and a wonderfully successful, product-centric
firm.
Let's come up with products that we can sell a
whole lot of, that's going to let us bring our costs down.