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Customers are an overlooked fundamental principle of marketing. Few companies truly understand their customers, accurately predict their behavior or consistently influence their decision making. Even fewer companies understand what "customer-focused" means, how to achieve it or why they might want to.
Half a century has now passed since the introduction of the marketing concept, which has customer orientation at its core. Few business decision makers could have avoided exposure to the evidence that customer-focused firms outperform the competition or to the pervasive belief that a customer-focused business model is critical for success in the 21st century. Yet, many companies seem to be caught in what has been called the "product trap." They're focused on and organized around their products, not their customers.
As a consultant and business professor I see the results of this corporate "psychological block" against customers all too frequently.
It's prevalent in e-business where too many companies adopt a "field of dreams" business strategy based squarely on building a better mousetrap (pun intended) and waiting for the world to click a digital path to their Web sites. Unfortunately - as one observer noted - building a great Web site with all the latest functionalities is a little like building the best lemonade stand in outer space. It may be the best, but there aren't any customers there.
And what about the telecommunications companies that are locked in a to-the-death struggle over price? Oh yeah, and they also spend some time designing bundles of product and service features to steal back the market share that their competitors stole back from them, ad nauseum. News services are now reporting that the imminent collapse of the telecommunications industry as we know it will rival that of the savings and loan industry.
Perhaps the active ignorance of customers is most significant in some sectors of the healthcare industry. Now, what is it that managed care manages? It sure doesn't seem to be customers - or "covered lives," the dehumanizing term some in this industry apply to their customers. Many players in the healthcare industry today have deconstructed customers into symptoms and disorders and organized around the products and services required to treat those symptoms and disorders. As a result many of us who need healthcare services are largely dissatisfied, more and more physicians are unhappy with how they are forced to practice medicine and managed care companies are crumbling.
At one time, and in certain industries, a business model based on building a better product may have worked. In today's economy and marketplace, however, the dynamics of customer choice are changing all around us. Building better customers, the theme of this site that I have built for my customers, is a model of conducting business that gets us back to Drucker's strategic imperative: to create a customer. A focus on building better customers allows us to think creatively and inventively about wrapping products and services around customers, to build value around the customer experience, and to anticipate the developing needs of potential customers and to respond with products and services that solve their problems and facilitate their dreams.
As I attempt to share, discuss and refine my interests in building better customers with my consulting and student audiences, seven critical factors frame my perspective of customer orientation. You have probably heard of the following concepts, none of them are original ideas of mine. But you may never have considered all of them at once, in the context of creating customers.
Opportunities lie with customers, not with products or services.
Customers don't buy products or product features, they buy benefits.
The only truly sustainable competitive advantage is a superior customer solution.
Customer value is greater than the sum of quality perceptions and satisfaction.
It's more important to listen to your customers than to research them.
Forget market demand and focus on customer experiences.
Success in customer focus is measured in terms of share of the customer, not market share.
Hopefully the resources available and the services offered at this Web site will help you better understand your customers, develop the personal and organizational perspectives required for effective customer-focused marketing and, more than anything else, begin to understand that the key to business success lies not with building better products, but with building better customers.