PROFITS Framework: Marrying Customer-centricity & Product-centricity
Product-centricity is an inward-out approach wherein the strategic focus is on developing better products and marketing their value to the customers. Traditionally, this has been the principal strategy for most organizations including companies such as Ford and Apple. Steve Jobs is famously known to have said, “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them,” and the success of Apple’s products-led strategy is well evident.
In recent years though, customer-centricity has gained a lot of traction wherein the focus is on solving customer problems. The products and solutions are developed to mitigate the pain-points in the customers’ journey thereby augmenting the customer experience with the value being symbiotically derived, for both the customer and the organization, by nourishing the relationship. With digital technologies and data processing capabilities available nowadays, it is possible to cater to the varying demands of individual customers by capturing and analyzing their behavior at each touchpoint in the customer journey thereby making necessary adjustments to improve the relationship (as is required in any relationship) and derive value.
In the wake of the above, the big question staring in the face of strategy teams is, “Whether to leverage on the efficiencies of a product-centric approach or to derive value over the customers’ lifetime through customer-centricity?”
The answer to the above lies in understanding that, for long-term value, it is imperative for your strategy to be a marriage of the product-centric and customer-centric approaches, as each of them has its own merits. Here, we are providing the PROFITS framework which, in our experience, has been extremely useful for our clients to make this marriage happen and be successful.
A picture is worth a thousand words and also a good memory tool. We use the following as a ready reckoner for our PROFITS framework:
For more information on the PROFITS Framework, reach out to us at contact@wakingmorpheus.com)
