Customer centricity is a con. Average marketers chant it when they’ve run out of creativity, or bow to the accountants and lawyers who run the place.
Customers don’t hand you the truth. They hand you clues without knowing they are doing it.
They tell you what they can describe, which reflects the status quo. They cannot tell you easily how they feel, or where currently unrecognised added value may be possible.
The technology to compress audio files, turning them into mp3 files existed well before Apple turned it into the iPod. Sony was the tech master, they had led the miniaturisation of components, they even had arguably the ideal brand in ‘Walkman’, but they did not put it all together as Apple did. They extrapolated, rather than innovating in customer value delivery, as they simply did not recognise it.
If you want to be genuinely customer centric, stop treating opinions as instructions. Treat them as evidence. Ask what they were feeling when they said it. Ask what they were trying to avoid. Ask what risk they were trying to outsource to you.
People unconsciously decide with feeling, then they reverse‑engineer a neat explanation that sounds rational.
That’s why “listening to customers” so often produces incrementalism. You end up optimising the current system instead of escaping it.
Evolution doesn’t reward the most logical species. It rewards the most adaptable. Corporate life forgets this key fact. Leaders obsess over efficiency and certainty, then act surprised when the market moves under their feet.
Look at a beehive. A meaningful share of bees don’t optimise today’s nectar run. They explore. They go hunting for entirely new sources of nectar.
That looks irrational if you stare at this week’s spreadsheet. It’s essential if you care about next year, and the year after.
Customer centricity isn’t a slogan. It’s disciplined curiosity. It’s hypothesis, testing, and the courage to fund a few of your bees to fly the wrong way on purpose.
Just like a beehive, when we base resource allocation choices with long term impact on short term rational foundations, we miss all the creativity, colour and movement of what appears at first glance to be irrational behaviour, but which ensure survival.
Header: by Nano Banana
