Customer Centricity: Focusing on Customer Needs and Touchpoints

Summary The term customer centricity has become a buzzword in marketing. Hardly any manager today will claim that their own company is not customer-centric, even if it is difficult to pin the term down to specific actions (let alone describe it as a whole). Against this background, the change in perspective from a product orientation to a customer orientation is explained first. In order for customer centricity to be put into practice in the company, prerequisites must be created. This concerns aspects such as management style, organization, communication, customer processes and information as well as customer indicators and controlling. As part of operational marketing, it is necessary to examine the extent to which the individual elements in the marketing mix can be designed to meet customer needs. In many cases, this relates to the product or service experience element, as seen in the interview on the relevance of customer centricity in stationary retail at the end of this chapter. However, pricing mechanisms that allow the customer to participate in pricing are also included and discussed in detail in this context. The “pay-what-you-want” model is an extreme form that has been discussed more intensively in recent years: The customer decides the price completely independently.