For a branding marketing specialist and novice alike, the long-standing dilemma has always been the road to take towards the ultimate goal – building a winning business. Understanding the difference between a product-centric and a customer-centric strategy can help your organization create better products and provide more value to customers.

Understanding Customer-Centric business approach

Customer-centric businesses prioritize customer satisfaction and create long-term value over profits. They focus on solving a customer problem and building brand loyalty organically. However, understanding customer preferences is time and cost-intensive.

How brand marketing works in such a model?

The brand positioning of such a business will always revolve around customer pain points and how their key solution is solving the problem. And therefore, brand marketing will always start by creating target audience personas and building communication to speak to a specific mindset at a time. The aim is to build a smooth customer journey while making customers understand how the benefit of the product can impact their lives. Research, interviews, and customer feedback have a major role to play in creating a marketing plan.

Pros:

• Customer-centric businesses invest heavily in customer research and CRM tools.
• They strive to understand their customers' pain points and characteristics to retain them and find new prospects.
• Customer journey mapping helps to strengthen trust and build brand loyalty.
• A strong customer base leads to better brand sustainability.

Cons:

• Focusing too much on customers can result in putting product development on the back seat.
• The competition in customer-centric markets is fierce, and a good product may be overshadowed by an exceptional competitor strategy.

How is product-centric business different?

In contrast, product-centric businesses focus on the quality of their product and creating a new demand for it. They invest heavily in research and development to upgrade their products continually and the product is the most critical aspect of the business. A unique and disruptive product can save time and money, but keeping up with changing technology can be a challenge.

How brand marketing works in such a model:

As the brand majorly revolves around the strong belief in the business’s key offering, all marketing strategies focus on putting out the best product features and wowing the audience with the newness and technical ability of the product. Brand marketing in a product-centric business always aims at creating aspirational value for its customers.

Pros:

• Drives consumer behaviour through unique solutions, design and service
• Allows for building the best product in its class
• Builds customer loyalty and long-lasting reputation

Cons:

• Highly cost-driven to keep evolving with changing technology for sustainability
• Product-dependent, and when product fails, company fails
• Risk of product being a misfit for the market and failing miserably
• Requires significant time and money for marketing and gaining momentum, leading to cash burn possibility

Conclusion: How should you decide on which approach suits your business the most?

Ideally, an organization would want to have the best of both worlds. A strong customer base cannot be built sans an outstanding product, and a customer base cannot be kept happy without an excellent customer experience. The challenge is maintaining a healthy balance between managing the product at scale and keeping customers happy. Brainstorming multiple factors like innovation, technology, and markets can help determine whether to adopt a product-centric or customer-centric strategy.

Here are a few factors to consider when choosing between product-centric and customer-centric approaches:

• Product-centric companies need to focus on product life cycle management and consistently produce better products to sustain success.
• Customer-centric approach is beneficial for budding startups with lower product development costs and technology deployment costs.
• Established and well-funded businesses can benefit from realigning their product management strategy to customer-centric.
• Product lifecycle management strategy is driven by the business approach with customer- centric approach adding value to existing products while product-centric may require closing a product line or building a new one to attract more customers.

So basically, consider product-centric if you have an innovative or disruptive product that may not solve an existing problem but can shift consumer behavior. Consider customer-centric if you're a budding entrepreneur to lower production, innovation, and technology costs. Established businesses that started as product-centric may benefit from realigning their product management strategy to customer-centric.