Customer centricity: the construct and the operational antecedents

Despite the relevant attention paid both by the academic and by the practitioner communities, extant understanding and knowledge about how to implement customer centricity is substantially scarce. The author draws on the occasional literature on customer centricity published over the last years in marketing and other disciplines, and on 43 field interviews with managers (marketers and non-marketers), consultants and academicians to move toward the establishment of a customer centricity theory. This work identifies and refines the domain of customer centricity, defines customer centricity under an operational viewpoint and provides a comprehensive framework for grounding further research on the topic, through the deepening of the personal, organizational, inter-organizational and instrumental antecedents of the adoption of a customer-centric strategy. The work concludes with managerial implications suggesting that, despite the enthusiasm around customer centricity, a thorough analysis of the contextual factors must be carried out to understand whether to be customer-centric or not. Further, some organizational and supply-chain implications are discussed.