"How does a company shift its culture and processes from a product-centric to customer-centric view, and how does it really 'know' it's been accomplished?"

This month's question was submitted by David L. Roberts, CBC and Principal, SMC 3, (dave@smc-frogpond.com).

Each month, we ask BMA members to contribute their advice and opinions about a timely question a member has submitted. If you are interested in submitting a question, contact Joanne Hasegawa. If your question is selected, you will receive a coupon for COPY bucks, good for $5 off a BMA luncheon of your choice. The editors reserve the right to edit or excerpt portions of responses due to space limitations.

Jim McBride, Director of Marketing, The Ideas Group, jmcbride@theideasgroup.com

From the brand up.

It all begins with defining every possible customer touch point in your organization — stationery and business cards, physical plant, employee handbook, print and online advertising, direct mail and email campaigns, trade show presence, website(s), sales support materials and sales rep behavior, product packaging, invoices, delivery service, a technical support 800 number, an employee or voicemail system, inquiry response time, investor relations, press releases, mentions in articles, sponsorships, community activities, CEO/executive visibility and style, and word-of-mouth.

Next, it requires taking the time to review each touch point from the customer's perspective to discover ANY opportunities to improve the customer's experience with your company — what's missing, and what can be done better or differently, or become more visibly and demonstrably customer-focused.

Then, make the necessary adjustments to maximize those opportunities.

Finally, communicate this shift internally and externally to all constituents (employees, vendors, partners, the media, the public at large) via email, memos/letters, surveys, website content, taglines and slogans, packaging, sales activity, advertising and promotional campaigns.

You know it has been accomplished when your customers actually respond to your customer-centric culture and approach — unsolicited, via a customer survey, or through increased sales.

In any case, influencing your customer's experience of your brand, customer-centric or not, is what marketing is all about.

Miles Mikasa, Product Marketing and Management, mmikasa@aol.com

A Product-Centric Company Loves Its Products. Engineering develops products based on leading-edge technology and intuition about what other technical people would want. Marketing mostly takes product requirements cues from Engineering and creates programs and materials that revolve around the product, and its features and performance. Sales clamors for more product training, and complains that the competition has a faster box. If customers need the newest technology, or by coincidence need what the company has, the company can prosper.

A Customer-Centric Company Loves Its Customers. Engineering develops products based on well-understood customer situations and will trade off cool technology for usability. Marketing has a deep understanding of customers and their needs, and has significant influence on product requirements. Marketing creates programs and materials that revolve around the customer, customer benefits, and building customer relationships. Sales clamors for market/customer training, floods marketing with intelligence on customer needs and competitive moves, and complains that marketing does not visit enough customers. Everyone in the company looks for ways to improve the customer's buying experience, and the company prospers.

How to Shift to a Customer-Centric Culture. Changing a company's culture is very difficult. The task becomes more feasible if the top managers recognize the need for the shift and are committed to make it work. They can serve as examples of customer-centric attitudes by constantly talking about fulfilling customer needs, visiting customers frequently, and sharing their findings with the company.

We, as marketers, can lead the charge to sell the idea to executives, and to work with our project teams to move the company in the right direction. We should describe the issues facing the product-centric viewpoint, and the benefits of moving to a more customer-centric viewpoint; be prepared to repeat the customer-focus objective and message at every instance of product-centric thinking, and encourage those who focus on customers. In addition, begin each project with a discussion about the intended customer, whether internal or external. Ensure that each team member from every department can answer a few key questions: Who are our customers? What are their needs? What benefits do they gain from our products or services?

Seven Signs that a Company Has Accomplished a Shift to a Customer-Centric Culture:
1. Executive staff members have personal relationships with top customers.
2. Marketing talks to customers as much as they talk to Engineering.
3. Sales invites Marketing to visit customers to learn their situations and needs.
4. Engineering considers ease-of-use, as well as performance in product development.
5. Marketing materials and programs focus on customer benefits rather than product features.
6. The whole organization understands the company's customers and their needs. Everyone works toward making the company easy to do business with, toward making the customer's experience as valuable as possible. Processes would include customer service, order processing, delivery, billing, and returns.
7. Customers say, "It's a pleasure to do business with you."

Bev Rindfleisch Lenihan, CBC, BMA VP Membership and Principal, Reesults Consulting, bev@reesults.com

It's safe to say that a decade ago the majority of high-tech firms in Silicon Valley were product-centric — characterized by their resource allocation of time, money and people. "Build a great product and they will come" was the mantra, and the company culture evolved around this notion. This was a natural outcome given that most of the management teams and the technical teams were at their very core engineers.

But over time, the symptoms of customer dissatisfaction, custom requirements and lagging sales, caused the collective sigh, "Something isn't working..."

The more progressive companies put their heads together — hired marketing and public relations counsel, checked out their successful consumer colleagues — and some even did benchmark research to find out what the customers seemed to need and want.

A case in point — in the late 70s, Apple hired Regis McKenna and his dynamic team to focus on the customer. I went to work for Mathews & Clark, a full service agency subcontracted to also work on the Apple account. I interviewed customers for their very popular Apple magazine. I not only wrote the stories, but I also gave feedback about what Todd Rundgren and the egg farmer in Iowa wanted in order to make their Apple computers an even more integral part of their art and business. Apple asked, they listened, and they acted.

How does a company change the culture to a customer-centric view? It's back to resources. What we spend our time and money on and how our intellectual capital gets utilized, in large measure, contributes to a company's business objectives, their tracking and reporting — and their outcomes. Spend a disproportionate amount on R&D, or engineering, or manufacturing, and you might get great products, and not enough customers. Invest in research, marketing, branding, sales development, customer service and support — and the focus changes to the customer.

A graphic example to me of how this works best is to set up cross-functional teams for new product launches. At Square D in Milwaukee, at Siemens, at Centigram, and at Mitel, I was fortunate to have a leadership position in numerous cross-functional teams. The customer was our check point. I often had to be the advocate for that customer as 20 or so of us would get tied up in trade-offs, adding three more months to launch so we could cram some more "neat" features into the product... when we were not sure we collectively asked the customer.

And how do you know when you're a customer-focused company? Ask them. Formally or informally get the input and feedback, track it, report it. What we measure, we do. Happy marketing in 2003!

Louise Saufley, Principal, Saufley & Associates, lsaufley@att.net

From the top down.

I have been involved with two companies that attempted this transition, with mixed results. Commitment and buy-in must be from the very top — from the Board of Directors, CEO, President, CFO, CTO, CMO, etc. — down to every field sales and customer service representative, and from every level in between. What's basically entailed is no less than a complete company culture paradigm shift — from technology and engineering functions driving new product development and marketing — to marketing and sales discerning customers' product needs and driving new products and technologies based on these needs. In my experience, this is at the very core of whether a company sees its marketing efforts as supporting its technologies and products (i.e., marketing as a service group) to marketing driving the best avenues of product and technological development (i.e., marketing as a strategic function). In addition to the overall challenge of implementing such a shift throughout the organization is the individual challenge to each employee — can they make the necessary shift in how they perceive their job and team functions? Again, in my experience, it's harder for engineers to make the shift to implementing marketing-based product direction than it is for marketers to rise to the occasion of driving product development based on customers' needs.