Customer Centricity Is a Journey—Not a Destination
Customer Centricity Is a Journey—Not a Destination
Customer centricity is one of the most widely accepted ideas in modern business. Leaders across industries agree that understanding customers—and organizing around their needs—should lead to better decisions, stronger performance, and long-term growth.
Yet for all the consensus, customer centricity remains remarkably difficult to sustain in practice.
That tension sits at the center of recent research published in the Academy of Marketing Science Review (AMSR). In a special section on customer centricity edited by Bernard Jaworski, Joel E. Urbany and Marta Dapena-Baron examine why so many customer-centric efforts fall short, and what differentiates the few organizations that make real progress
They emphasize clearly the idea: customer centricity is not something organizations “implement” and move on from. It is a journey—one shaped by time, organizational maturity, and the human realities of change.
Where the Journey Begins
Most customer-centric journeys start with belief.
Organizations commit to the idea in strategy documents, leadership messages, and mission statements.
Teams invest in customer data, voice-of-the-customer programs, journey mapping, and experience improvements. Early progress can feel tangible and energizing. At this stage, optimism is high, and the work feels manageable.
Where Many Journeys Stall
Drawing on executive interviews and prior research, Urbany and Dapena-Baron show that up to 70% of customer-centricity initiatives fail to deliver on expectations. These failures are rarely the result of indifference or poor intent. Instead, they stem from a fundamental underestimation of what customer centricity actually requires.
As the journey unfolds, organizations encounter challenges that are harder to anticipate:
Change takes longer than expected—often multiple business cycles.
Deeply embedded beliefs and habits resist disruption.
Existing structures and incentives no longer align with stated priorities.
Employees struggle to reconcile new expectations with old ways of working.
When these realities surface, momentum slows. In many cases, initiatives quietly lose priority or are replaced by the next “fix.”
Why So Few Make It Far
Only about 9% of companies operate in a truly customer-centric way, consistently placing customers at the center of decisions and adapting over time.
One reason success is so rare is confusion around definition. In The Pursuit of Customer Centricity, Urbany and Dapena-Baron note that academic research alone contains more than 50 different definitions of customer centricity. In practice, this leads organizations to pursue very different—and often incomplete—paths under the same label.
Some focus narrowly on customer experience. Others emphasize analytics, culture, or marketing ownership. While each of these elements can be valuable, the research shows that partial approaches rarely lead to sustained progress.
The Shortcut That Leads to a Dead End
To make customer centricity more manageable, organizations often treat it as:
A marketing initiative
A customer experience program
A data or technology upgrade
These efforts can produce local improvements—but they tend to stall because they leave the broader organization unchanged. Customer centricity is not something that lives in one function or system. It reshapes how decisions are made, how authority is distributed, and how success is defined.
Treating it as a discrete project creates the illusion of progress without addressing the underlying journey.
A System, Not a Single Step
In their companion AMSR article, The Gestalt of Customer Centricity: Forces of Resistance and Research Priorities, Urbany and Dapena-Baron introduce a systems-level view of customer centricity.
Their central insight is that customer centricity functions as a Gestalt—a whole that emerges only when multiple interdependent elements move together:
Legacy practices and beliefs
How customer insight is gathered, shared, and used
Organizational structure and decision rights
The change process itself
Improving one element while neglecting others weakens the entire system. Insight without empowerment goes unused. Structural changes without cultural support generate resistance. Leadership messaging without reinforcement through incentives fades quickly.
The Human Side of the Journey
The toughest obstacles to customer centricity are not external. They are internal.
Customer centricity challenges long-standing assumptions about expertise, authority, and success, especially in organizations that have thrived under more product-centric or internally focused models. Resistance is often subtle and unintentional, rooted in past success rather than opposition to customers.
The research emphasizes that acknowledging and addressing this human terrain is essential. Customer centricity cannot be sustained through tools and processes alone.
Why Employees Matter as Much as Customers
A critical—and often overlooked—finding across both articles is that customer centricity endures only when it creates distinctive value for employees, not just customers.
Organizations that progress on the journey empower teams closest to customers, provide access to meaningful insight, and trust employees to act on it. Leadership reinforces these behaviors through structure, incentives, and example, not just rhetoric.
When employees feel informed, valued, and empowered, customer-centric behavior becomes part of how work gets done.
Staying on the Path
Customer centricity has no finish line. As Jaworski notes in his editorial introduction to the special section, progress depends heavily on organizational maturity and execution—not aspiration alone. The journey is long, uneven, and demanding.
But for organizations willing to stay on the path—and to confront the organizational realities the research highlights—customer centricity becomes more than a slogan. It becomes a durable capability, built over time.
About the Research
The Gestalt of Customer Centricity
Academy of Marketing Science Review (AMSR); Volume 14 (2024)
Author: Bernie Jaworski
Citation: Jaworski, B. The gestalt of customer centricity. AMS Rev 14, 297 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13162-024-00287-5
The Pursuit of Customer Centricity
Academy of Marketing Science Review (AMSR); Volume 14 (2024)
Authors:
Joel E. Urbany
Citation: Urbany, J.E., Dapena-Baron, M. The pursuit of customer centricity. AMS Rev 14, 298–307 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13162-024-00288-4
The Gestalt of Customer Centricity: Forces of Resistance and Research Priorities
Academy of Marketing Science Review (AMSR); Volume 14 (2024)
Authors:
Joel E. Urbany
Urbany, J.E., Dapena-Baron, M. The gestalt of customer centricity: Forces of resistance and research priorities. AMS Rev 14, 308–329 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13162-024-00289-3
From the Authors
What specific relevant marketing challenge(s) does your article address?
Despite their popularity and billions of investment, up to 70% of customer centricity initiatives fail to deliver on expectations. Why is this?
We explore why companies struggle to implement and sustain customer-centric practices through the experiences of two medical technology companies, Mature Centric and Early Centric; and through review of relevant literature. Together these articles, coalesce into a holistic view of customer centricity – what it is, and how to achieve it - in both theory and practice.
We explore why organizations struggle to implement and sustain customer-centric practices. Key challenges include:
Lack of consensus on what customer centricity means: The concept is defined differently across academic and business circles, making implementation inconsistent.
Underestimation of complexity: Many firms fail to grasp the full scope of transformation required for customer centricity, leading to unrealistic expectations and eventual resistance.
Lack of an integrated view: Companies often focus on isolated aspects of customer centricity (e.g., marketing or sales) rather than treating it as a holistic transformation.
Employee resistance: Getting employee buy-in is as crucial as meeting customer needs, but companies struggle to align internal culture with customer-centric initiatives.
Legacy beliefs and mindset resistance: Employees and executives accustomed to traditional business models resist new customer-focused approaches.
Customer intelligence acquisition and dissemination: Many organizations fail to effectively gather, share, and integrate customer intelligence into their strategic decisions.
Organizational structure and decision-making: Companies that successfully implement customer-centricity (like Mature Centric) decentralize decision-making, whereas those struggling (like Early Centric) still rely on legacy structures.
