Echoes of “Customer-Centric” Marketing

I heard the echoes of the wisdom of my management hero, Peter Drucker, when reading about the marketing success of Stuart Amos, President and CEO of FLAVORx, Inc., a successful medication-flavoring system. In a “Baltimore SmartCEO” article, Amos is quoted as saying:

“So many companies think that if they design this great product, people are just going to bang the door down and buy it. You need to be always solving your customer’s problem, whatever it is, and often, the trick is finding out what his problems are, what his strategies are. It’s a lot of work to peel that onion.”

The echo of Peter Drucker, known as the father of modern management, came from my interviews with him in the 1990s when we discussed my favorite Drucker quote, which I believe should be the guiding principle for all marketers, managers and business leaders. Peter Drucker wrote:

“Marketing is not only much broader than selling, it is not a specialized activity at all. It encompasses the entire business. It is the whole business seen from the point of view of its final result; that is, from the customer’s point of view.”

Learning the customer’s point of view is akin to Mr. Amos’ advice to “peel that onion.”

In the SmartCEO article, written by Linda Strowbridge, Mr. Amos talks about the importance of “understanding everything about your customer – what they are driving for, what their goals are.” He advises, “You should know your customer as well as you know yourself.”

How you do this, of course, is by gathering customer information. You must study your customers’ needs, wants and preferences to supply what they are seeking. This concept is sometimes characterized as the WIIFM approach, in which the customer figuratively asks “What’s In It For Me?”

Customer research can take many forms, from the very simple to the extremely complex. The simplest way to find out what customers or prospects want or need is to ask them.

Using surveys, focus groups, one-on-one interviews, etc., you can periodically determine your customers’ needs and react to satisfy them. These information-gathering techniques have a number of ancillary benefits:

• Keeping in contact and building an ongoing relationship with the customer.
• Discovering problem areas or mistakes you may be making.
• Creating sales opportunities.
• Building a customer database.

Follow the advice of Peter Drucker or Stuart Amos and you’ll have a “customer-centric” rather than a “product-centric” philosophy, one that realizes it is the customer not the company who decides what he or she will buy.