Customer-Centric Marketing: Definition, Examples, Strategy

Customer-centric marketing is one of the key business trends of 2024. It helps top companies maintain leadership positions and helps ambitious startups operate in highly competitive markets. By adopting this strategy, you can significantly increase customer loyalty, improve engagement rates, and increase marketing profitability. 

Let's dive deeper into this subject to see how the strategy works, how to use it in your business, and review examples to inspire you to generate your own ideas.

What is Customer-Centric Marketing

Customer-centric marketing is a business model in which a customer's needs, desires, and interests are the central element. It appears in any interaction with the target audience - sales, advertising, services, customer support, transportation of goods, etc. 

The customer-centered marketing definition implies a fundamental change in business management policy. When making important decisions, management should ask, "How will this help our customers?" rather than "How will this affect our financial performance?"

It is interesting that when you put the needs of the target audience at the center of your marketing policy instead of profits and revenues, you can increase the latter. This effect is achieved by increasing customer loyalty, which leads to an increase in their lifetime business value. 

As a result, you will have more revenue by spending less on advertising, customer support, and complaints handling. This comprehensive optimization of your business model gives you a significant competitive advantage.

Examples of Customer-Centric Marketing

Almost all companies that hold leadership positions in their segments use the customer-centric approach to marketing in one form or another. Having studied their experience, you can form your own ideas that will drive your business.

Ikea

Think of a long and complicated process of buying furniture. What if a wardrobe doesn't match the color of the desk? What if a bedside table doesn't fit next to the bed? Don't worry. Ikea eliminates such issues. By running the furniture hypermarket's mobile app, you can see how its products will look in augmented reality.

The app overlays 3D models of furniture on a real camera image. It will even tell you how far away you should stand to accurately estimate the dimensions. 

This digital feature has become a great addition to the Swedish company's customer-centric strategy. It goes far beyond online. For example, in physical hypermarkets, you will see realistic interiors rather than furniture displays. Many products are available for testing, such as sitting on sofas or riding computer chairs with wheels.

If you want to follow Ikea's example and develop an app to simplify customers' lives, promote your app on your website with Claspo widgets. They can draw attention to your innovation while also explaining its benefits and directing site visitors to the appropriate download page. Claspo has already helped Devart increase product downloads by 48% and can repeat this success for your customer-centric company!

Happy Returns

Happy Returns is another excellent example of customer-centered marketing. The company literally grew out of the needs of consumers. It helps people return goods to other sellers, greatly facilitating the stage of interaction with a brand that usually causes the most irritation. The company has several thousand branches in the United States, so customers don't have to use postal services.

Happy Returns takes its customer-centered approach very seriously. The company has abandoned receipts, invoices, and other documents in favor of QR codes, greatly simplifying request processing. In addition, it emphasizes environmental protection by sending goods in reusable textile bags instead of cardboard boxes and plastic containers.

Stitch Fix

In conventional clothing online stores, you have to scroll through dozens of pages to find products that meet your needs. At Stitch Fix, you only have to complete a short survey that will take 2–3 minutes. The questions are about your favorite styles and colors, approximate size, and budget.

The company uses the latest technologies in its customer-centric strategy, such as machine learning, Big Data, and artificial intelligence. According to Stitch Fix CEO Christina Lake, their use has helped to increase profits by 17% in a short period of time.

Hilton

The largest hotel chain in the world carefully studied their customers’ needs and made a rather obvious conclusion. Most want to minimize contact with employees for comfort, security, or privacy. And once again, the solution was a mobile app.

The Hilton Honors app is one of the great customer-centric marketing examples. It replaces key cards for doors and elevators and allows you to order food and room service. The app also allows you to make payments and use virtual tours. The application not only improves the quality of services but also allows the company to collect a large amount of useful information.

How to Build an Effective Customer-Centric Marketing Strategy: 4 Steps

The main thing you need to know about the customer-centric marketing strategy is that its development starts with leadership. It takes will and determination to shift the focus from business needs to customer needs, as these changes are often met with doubts and outright resistance. That's why the most challenging part is getting started, and the next steps will be much easier.

1. Learn more about your customers

Collecting information is the cornerstone of marketing in any business sphere. If you are going to build your business based on your customers' needs, you need to know and accept them. To get the necessary data, you should use the following tools:

• Surveys. With Claspo, you can easily create widgets that contain a short survey form or redirect website visitors to a separate page with a detailed survey.

• Focus groups and interviews. During face-to-face communication, you can also assess non-verbal signals, such as emotions, facial expressions, postures, etc.
• Analyze customer service calls. Building customer-centric marketing strategies is sometimes very simple - you just need to listen to what customers say about you.
• Monitor social media, review aggregators, forums, and other similar platforms. Sometimes, you can spot profound ideas that can be adopted almost ready-made.

The above examples show that the analysis of collected information also plays an important role. Today, it involves innovative solutions based on artificial intelligence to predict consumer behavior accurately.

2. Rebuild the customer journey

Sales, leads, and conversions are strategies of the past, focused on today's benefits. However, aggressive tactics often leave customers dissatisfied and irritated. To avoid this, you only need to outline the problem, help a consumer understand its essence and causes, and then provide a ready-made solution.

As for the latter, it really should be comprehensive. Make contacting your company a part of everyday life, not an exceptional event. In an online business, this means a simple and clear user interface and a message written in the customer's language. Make an effort to improve the quality of service - its goal should be to solve customers’ problems, not to increase the company's profit.

3. Add value to every interaction

In a customer-centered marketing model, a consumer benefits from every episode of interaction with the brand. It all starts with an advertisement, which often outlines and analyzes a specific problem. After seeing it, a potential client realizes they can satisfy their need relatively quickly and easily, motivating them to contact the company.

Useful interaction continues in the next stages of the sales funnel. The company provides customers with interesting materials in the form of a blog, email newsletter, or personalized recommendations. It creates a close connection with the audience, which sometimes implies not only a rational component but also an emotional one.

4. Focus on long-term cooperation

Your ultimate goal in the customer-centric strategy is to make sure that your customers return to you repeatedly. This means that your business should be associated with significant competitive advantages, including a favorable product price. Think carefully about the discount system and bonuses, and add non-price benefits to your offer, such as fast delivery, convenient payment, prompt support, etc.

Claspo widgets are an easy way to show your bonuses and offers to your site visitors. They can be displayed on selected pages and in the proper context. For example, you can provide a discount for the next purchase on the "Thank you" page or invite visitors to contact the support team if they have not been active on the website for a long time. Claspo improves the customer journey on the website and the results of your business!

Long-term cooperation also means being prepared to retain a client when they decide to leave you. Your analytics system should be able to track or even predict such situations by running appropriate scripts. Claspo has solutions for these cases, too. You can create widgets that appear when visitors try to leave the site or click the unsubscribe button.

How Can Claspo Help to Build Your Customer-Centric Marketing Strategy

Claspo is an effective tool to strengthen your customer-centric strategy for several reasons:

• Our flexible display rules allow you to intelligently fit widgets into your website's customer journey.
• Our advanced targeting options are designed to personalize your message and adapt it to the needs and interests of specific audience segments,
• Our default display rules automatically protect your widgets from simultaneously appearing and overlapping, ensuring a flawless user experience on your website!

The best part is that you can create widgets for any purpose without experience or programming skills. So, your first widget can appear on your website today! Try Claspo now and see what it can do for your customer-centric strategy.