The metaphor that I like to use here comes from finance.
We want to have some really high flying stocks in our financial portfolio.
High risk, high return, we definitely want to have some of them.
Those are going to be where the real growth comes from.
But the day to day stability comes from the more predictable ones, the cash,
the bonds, and so on.
So in our customer mix, we want to have that same kind of portfolio approach.
We want to have a large number of these stable, predictable, but
potentially not very valuable customers that we're going to balance off with
the high-flyer customers, the really focal ones.
This is where I come up with the notion of the paradox of customer centricity.
Goes like this.
The more we zoom in on those really valuable customers, the more we need those
other customers around in order to have a stable balance for the company as a whole.
You see, with only a few exceptions, no company can be truly,
purely customer-centric.
If you're a private wealth manager and your customer base consists of
four billionaires, yes, you can be totally customer-centric.
You know everything about every one of them.
You can be a trusted advisor to each one of them.
But if you have millions or tens or hundreds of millions of customers,
it's a matter of finding that just right balance between being truly
customer-centric, with the customer segments that we see as really valuable.
But, being product centric with the remaining customers who are not as
valuable, being operationally efficient with them.
Now, the difference between a true product centric firm is
that we are not going to let those so-so customers drive the business.
We are going to continue to focus on the customer centered ones for growth.
We're going to continue to focus a disproportionate amount of our R and
D activity on those really good customers, coming up with products for them,
hoping and finding ways to make those same products palatable and attractive for
the product-centric customers but it's a matter of finding that balance.
That's the paradox of customer centricity and
one of the challenges for firms is to figure out how to do that well.
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