EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The pursuit of customer centricity

Joel E. Urbany () and Marta Dapena-Baron ()
Additional contact information
Joel E. Urbany: Mendoza College of Business, Marketing, University of Notre Dame
Marta Dapena-Baron: The Big Picture Partners, LLC

AMS Review, 2024, vol. 14, issue 3, No 10, 298-307

Abstract: Abstract The literature on customer centricity is large and growing, as befits the study of a concept that is arguably at the core of marketing theory and practice. At this point in time, however, there are two troubling aspects of our understanding of customer centricity: (1) There is significant variance in the understanding of the basic concept, illustrated most clearly in (Mier and Jaworski’s Customer Centricity: Definitions, Archetypes, and Future Research 2024) recent discovery of over 50 distinct definitions in the literature, and (2) While evidence shows favorable returns from customer centric initiatives, in practice, many firms struggle to make such initiatives profitable and sustainable. Here, we explore the concept of customer centricity with two senior executives in the medical technology industry. The interviews highlight the complex layers of customer-centric practice in an organization and reinforce the fact that a process of broader organizational change is fundamental to the adoption of any customer-centric operating model. The interviewees provide especially important insight into how an organization in an advanced stage enables customer-centric practice in ways that synergistically enhance its absorptive capacity and widen its view of growth opportunity, as well as the key sources of resistance in earlier stages of adoption.

Keywords: Customer centricity; Customer orientation; Journey to customer centricity; Organizational change; Organizational structure; Market-sensing; Resistance; Legacy beliefs; Marketing function role in change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s13162-024-00288-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:amsrev:v:14:y:2024:i:3:d:10.1007_s13162-024-00288-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... gement/journal/13162

DOI: 10.1007/s13162-024-00288-4

Access Statistics for this article

AMS Review is currently edited by Manjit S. Yadav

More articles in AMS Review from Springer, Academy of Marketing Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2025-04-12
Handle: RePEc:spr:amsrev:v:14:y:2024:i:3:d:10.1007_s13162-024-00288-4