How Best Buy Revived Itself By Falling in Love With the Customer

The Death of Product Centricity and the Rise of Customer Obsession

Product-centered marketing used to be the only business strategy that worked. You didn’t know who came into your shop and it would be painful to keep data on each one. Instead of focusing on the customers, just make the best product and sell them to as many nameless, faceless customers as you can.

That’s a floundering business strategy to be following in the age of digital businesses. In an age where anywhere you travel on any site leads a trail of data for analysts to utilize, product centricity doesn’t work anymore. Whatever you call it — ‘spray and pray’, ‘one size fits all’ — the notion of targeting what the ‘average customer’ thinks is outdated. When all the customer data is available, if your business doesn’t utilize it, your competitors will. A product-centric approach is analogous to marketing pearls for five cents each door to door — most of the clients won’t even open the door.

Why is Macy’s failing but Amazon soaring? Both provide roughly the same quality and variety of clothing, but Macy is…