Andy Warhol was right

The importance of putting customers first in driving repeat business and boosting brand recommendations is undeniable. Yet customer centricity does not always deliver against its promises. The well-known 80/20 Pareto rule turned into a 60/40 rule, proving that customer loyalty is in decline, and current life expectancy of a Fortune 500 firm is less than 15 years, highlighting customers’ fickle behavior. 

It shows the deficit of the once-sacred and perceived-to-be-timeless truths of 20th century management thinking, including the top-down mental model we use when considering the role of customers. Andy Warhol was right when he stated in 1968 that “in the future everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes.”. Globalization and the internet changed everything, with anyone anywhere having the power to make a difference. According to Warhol, someday the ‘hierarchy of subjects’ would be abolished, with anybody and therefore everybody becoming famous at some point in time. 

What would happen if we applied Andy Warhol’s quote to the concept of consumer centricity? All stakeholders would be truly equal, empowering customers to act as employees, and employees to think as customers. Employees would be able to let go more easily of whatever they are experts at, helping them to think ‘out of the box’. However they would not blindly follow the dogmatic statement that ‘the customer is always right’, as this gives them the wrong impression that they can never get it right. A great example of treating each other as equals is how H.J. Heinz Company had its marketers work together directly with customers to detect new ketchup consumption occasions. In the participation age, companies need to tear down the walls they built around them, and say goodbye to the old dichotomy between outside-in and inside-out thinking. 

To be relevant in today’s challenging times, businesses and marketers need to embrace a more active approach towards customer centricity. It’s about integrating the voice of the consumer in everything they do, by everyone in the organization, a concept we call ‘consumer intuition’. Want to know more? Download our latest digital bookzine “Better Together: From consumer intelligence to consumer intuition”.