The Marketing Concept: The Power of Customer-Centered Strategies

Authors: Burghi Vanni Maria Justina, Kleiser Paula Maria, Puceiro Olivera Catalina, Schlepers Michelle, Mario Navarro Piles

 Introduction and Emergence of the Marketing Philosophy

In the modern business landscape, the marketing strategies were further developed. The time of companies simply pushing a product to the market is gone. From now on its crucial important to create a lasting connection with consumers and to promote the growth of the company. The marketing concept, which places customers at the center of all decisions has proven to be mostly effective for ensuring a long-term success
The concept of customer-centered marketing is all about the needs, preferences, and experiences of customers at every stage of interaction with the product. Businesses that work with this philosophy often see better engagement, better customer satisfaction and higher profitability. This article looks at the power of customer-centric strategies and why they are crucial to success in today’s competitive marketplace. Additional to that it points out how organizations can implement them effective.
In the mid of the 1950s, the marketing philosophy developed into a customer-centered philosophy that focused on the needs of customers. This further development created a fundamental change in the way companies thought about their marketing strategies. In contrast to earlier product-centric approaches, now the marketing philosophy underlines the importance of satisfying customer needs to achieve the company’s goals.
Under this philosophy, it became clearer that the key to success companies’ goals lays in creating and communicating a better customer experience that works more effective than the competition. Companies that work with this approach not only aimed to satisfy customer needs, but also to build long-term relationships with their target market by permanently providing added value.

Selling vs. Marketing: The Core Difference.

A perfect example is Dell. They don’t just pump out PCs and laptops based on some pre-set design for a general market. They give you these platforms where you can actually customize your machine with exactly what you want. That’s a huge change from just pushing products; it’s all about what the customer needs and wants.
Basically, marketing is all about hitting your company goals by being obsessed with the customer. It means making sure everything you do, from designing the product to how you sell it and help people out afterward, is all about giving customers what they value most.
This guy from Harvard, Theodore Levitt, had a great way of explaining the difference between selling and marketing. He basically said:
● “Selling is about what the seller needs.”
● “Marketing is about what the buyer needs.”
Think of it this way: when you’re just selling, you’re mainly thinking about turning stuff into cash, just focusing on the sale itself. But marketing is all about making the customer happy. And that’s not just about the product itself, but the whole experience – making it, getting it to you, and even what happens after you start using it.

The Basic Pillars of Customer-Centered Marketing

Transforming a company from a traditional company-driven approach to a customer driven one is what is most critical nowadays, as it marks a major shift in perspective. This appears to be easier than it really is, as many companies have a difficult time adopting the marketing concept and fully letting go of the product and sales-driven mentality that has existed since the early 20th century.
The key of customer-centered marketing is understanding that customers are not just passive recipients of marketing messages but actually active individuals who determine the probability of a business’s success. Thus, to successfully implement this shift, companies must research and align their values, goals and practices with the expectations of their engaged customers.
As follows, the three core principles of the marketing concept:

Understanding Customer Needs

In order to not only creatively but efficiently establish customer-centric strategies, companies must do a thorough investigation into their customers’ needs, desires, and pain points. This requires deep research of data from several sources and touchpoints. Two categories of sources emerge: either primary (data that is firsthand), such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, observations, customer feedback, reviews, or secondary (pre-existing information) like old reports, public data, case studies.
Taking the time to do all this ensures, or at least allows, companies to adjust their offerings, marketing and approach strategies in order to meet their customers’ wants and needs.
3.2 Personalization and Customization
When the moment arrives where a company tries to shift its perspective towards a customer-centered strategy, the most important tool it needs to take into consideration is “personalization”. One as a customer is always looking out for companies that make a true effort to make their clients feel special and that go out of their way to treat them as individuals rather than just another customer. For that reason, in order to create that strong emotional connection with the clients, companies must really focus on a strategy that includes: personalized marketing messages, custom-built product offering, and tailored customer experiences. Overall, this kind of treatment will make customers feel listened and accompanied, finally encouraging a relationship built on loyalty.

Customer Experience

During the digital transformation era, customer experience has proven to be a critical component of customer-centered marketing. Nowadays, offering only a product that’s “great” is not enough, as customers now expect continuous interactions across all channels of communication (online or offline). Interactions must last from the first moment when the customer gets in touch with the company and prevail even through the post-purchase support; this continuity is essential for retaining every customer and even encouraging them to come back

Benefits of Customer-Centered Strategies

4.1 Increased Customer Loyalty
Being able to comprehend and portray the customers’ needs as a company, will lead to a higher retention. Keeping your customers loyal and happy, causes them to continuously buy your product or service, and spread the word around on your brand to other people. Based on research, it is 5 times more expensive to get new customers, than it is to retain someone who is a customer already, which will increase company growth.
4.2 Enhanced Brand Reputation
Customer-centric companies have a better reputation as a brand. Customer satisfaction is advertised by good word-of mouth stories or positive online reviews with others, which makes this organic marketing strategy very useful to creating a better image for your brand.
4.3 Competitive Advantage
When being part of a highly competitive market for products or services, a company can enhance the experience a customer goes through. Using that enhancement can result in an advantage over your competitors and gain a bigger share in the market.
4.4 Better Financial Performance
Looking at the financial performance, specifically profitability and revenue growth, research shows that customer-centric companies are likely to perform better than their competitors. An increase in customer satisfaction creates higher brand loyalty, a higher retention and repeated purchases by customers.

Designing Effective Customer-Centered Strategies

In order to create a customer-centered strategy not only is it necessary to comprehend customer needs but also it is mandatory to holistically approach the matter, meaning that it is needed to integrate customer perspective in every part of the business. For building this kind of strategies, the following steps could be taken by a company:

5.1. Collect and Analyze Customer Data
For creating personalized and relevant marketing strategies it is fundamental to understand the customer journey, identifying different touchpoints where the customer interacts with the brand. Due to the fact that information is key in a strategy that focuses on the customer, investing in tools that permit collect and interpret information should be of top priority. Some examples are; customer feedback, purchasing behaviour and social media engagement.
5.2. Creating a Buyer Persona
Thanks to the data collected, the creation of a buyer permits summarizing the model of customer the company targets. Underlying physical and intellectual characteristics, demography, its culture, preferences, and weaknesses, creates the atmosphere for a better understanding of the customer. As a result, not only can companies create effective messages and campaigns but also it can anticipate a future customer need.
5.3. Neverending Customer Feedback
Collecting data does not end. Customers’ needs are constantly changing and that is why customer feedback should be something that a company always seeks for. The fact that this is powerful information which can lead a company to develop a product that everyone was waiting for and nobody could develop, makes it very appealing and demanding. This feedback can be gathered through different methods such as interviews, focus groups, social media interactions, field research and more importantly actively listening.

Conclusion:customer-centered strategies can’t be overvalued

The Power of customer-centered strategies can’t be overvalued. By putting the focus on the needs, ideas and wishes of customers, business can not only improve satisfaction, but it can also drive growth, promote loyalty, and gain a competitive advantage. Companies that include this concept of placing the customers in the middle of their operations, are more likely to succeed in an increasingly customer-driven markets.
The key competitive of companies which implement a customer- centered strategy should be to fulfil their customer needs quickly and efficiently to have an advantage over their competitors in a rapidly developing marketplace. Therefore, technology also plays nowadays a significant role if the company wants to implement a customer-centric strategy. Using of technical tools such as Artificial Intelligence allow businesses to gain deeper insights into their customer behavior.
To maintain their lead in times of innovative development especially AI and the ever-increasing expansion of online purchases, it’s important that companies also stay flexible and come up with new ideas all the time to meet the changing customer expectations.
By embracing a dynamic approach helps companies not only meet current requirements, but also spot future trends early on and ensure by that their long-term success.
Customer-centric strategies are therefore not only a competitive advantage- they are also an important component of sustaining growth in a constantly changing marketplace.

Sources:

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