Handbook on Customer Centricity

Drawing on the expertise of leading marketing scholars, this book provides managers and researchers with insights into the fundamentals of customer centricity and how firms can develop it. Customer centricity is not just about segmentation or short-term marketing tactics. Rather, it represents an organization-wide philosophy that focuses on the systematic and continuous alignment of the firm’s internal architecture, strategy, capabilities, and offerings with external customers.

This philosophy means that to be truly customer-centric, firms need to make multilevel transformations in internal architecture and organizational design, including leadership, metrics, incentives, structure, processes, and systems. These reorganizations are often accompanied by reshaped relational strategies, such as customer loyalty programs and marketing channel strategies that make customer centricity a reality. These changes also need to be backed by reconfigurations of brand and technological capabilities, as manifested in healthy customer-centric brands and in technology systems and skills that enable customer centricity at scale. The contributors to this book provide current thinking and cutting-edge research to further scholars’ understanding of this key concept in marketing.

Academics teaching or researching customer centricity, consultants implementing customer centricity and managers directly implementing customer centricity in their organizations will come to rely on the Handbook on Customer Centricity. Marketing associations, industry associations and local and university libraries will find the insights within offer critical reflection on the key features of customer centricity and the detailed roadmap to achieve it.