Leadership Talk by Inge Jan Henjesand

Abstract

Customer centricity is the strategy that aligns a company's development and delivery of products and services with the current and future needs of a select set of customers to maximize the long-term financial value to the firm. 

The traditional marketing part of customer centricity include all decisions and activities involved in development and delivery of the company's products and services, e.g., customer segmentation, understanding customer lifetime value, customer behavior, customer experience, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, customer portfolio management, product development, pricing, distribution, and communication. 

The troublesome part of implementing customer centricity is related to aligning the company's organizational culture, organizational structure, business processes, information systems, information management, financial and other metrics, and leadership. Leadership and leadership commitment are considered the factors that make all the other things happen. 

Research has shown that absence of leadership, stifling cultures, management turmoil during change initiatives, lack of urgency and system deficiencies are the most frequent reasons for companies to fail implementing a customer centric strategy. Even though leaders of companies claim to be customer oriented, market oriented or even customer centric, it is more often a boardroom buzzword than addressing the issues needed to implement a customer centric strategy.

Being an associate professor in marketing with experience as leader and board member in different organizations, I would like to develop an executive management program focusing on the tasks of aligning the leadership, the organizational culture, the organizational structure, the business processes, the information management, and the metrics needed to transform the company from product centric to (more) customer centric.