Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage

Despite what the old adage says, the customer is not always right. Even companies that can seemingly do no wrong-like the coffeehouse giant Starbucks-have only recently started to figure this out.

Starbucks is one of many companies that has successfully executed a pivot that puts the company in a customer-centric mindset, an approach that Wharton professor Peter Fader describes in Customer Centricity. Fader advocates that in the world of customer centricity, there are good customers . . . and then there is pretty much everybody else.

In a new preface and afterword to Customer Centricity, Fader reflects on how the landscape has changed over nearly a decade since he first proposed that businesses radically rethink how they relate to customers. Using examples from Starbucks, Nordstrom, and more, Fader provides insights to help you understand why customer centricity is the new model for success in today's data-driven environment; how the ideas of brand equity and customer asset value help us understand what kinds of companies naturally lend themselves to the customer-centric model and which ones don't; why the traditional models for determining the value of individual customers are flawed; how executives can use customer lifetime value (CLV) and other customer-centric data to make smarter decisions about their companies; and more.

About the Author

Peter S. Fader is the Frances and Pei-Yuan Chia Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. In 2015, Fader co-founded Zodiac, a predictive analytics firm that was acquired by Nike in 2018. More recently, he co-founded Theta Equity Partners, which focuses on customer-based corporate valuation. Fader is the author of Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage and coauthor with Sarah E. Toms of the book The Customer Centricity Playbook. He has been quoted or featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Washington Post, and on NPR, among other media. Follow him on twitter @faderp.