Customer Centricity Part 1 - Are we Asking the Right Questions?

Every day at work, I end up getting into a fight….with myself.

It’s sort of my job to get in this fight. In my two roles at Wago--Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and Chief Digital Officer (CDO)--, I am constantly in conflict with myself. Digital me wants to lead with innovation, leveraging technological tools, seeing where exciting new platforms can take us. Meanwhile, the marketing me says, “not so fast!” In my CMO role, I’m not interested in technology for technology’s sake; I want to keep things customer-centric. Digitalization is fine, but what’s in it for the customer? How does it help us show up for them? You can’t stay relevant without technology, but you can’t win without a customer-centric attitude. 

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this ongoing, split-personality brawl with myself, it’s that we must always balance the “how” (our tech stack) with the deeper “why” (what we use them for). Technology is an enabler. The question is, what are we enabling? If we don’t ask that question, we’re totally lost. 

Of each digital innovation, we must ask:

-Why are we using it?

-What does it do?

-What can it do for us? For our customers? For the community/ the world?

These questions are vital because as technology advances, it becomes harder to take for granted that we know what we are doing with it. Over the past 20 years, algorithms and search functions have taken the place of manually sifting through card-catalogs and library archives for information. Fine, everybody knows that. The way we do business has adjusted to that reality. But the next stage in that evolution is where it gets really interesting. We no longer want to do the searching ourselves. We’re living in the early days of the Internet of Things (IoT). The work that the digital revolution streamlined for us is now being delegated to machine learning and AI in smart devices and wearables. The result is that today’s B2B world is more and more a market of operating systems selling to operating systems OS2OS if you will. Success today depends on the integration and functionality of your product or service within other operating systems. Hardware is little more than a shell. Even Tesla is just a shell on wheels for a “transportation OS.” If this paradigm shift can apply to a car, the original product of last-century industrialization, it’s incumbent upon all businesses, from SAAS startups to makers of bespoke electrical engineering solutions, like Wago, to pay attention and adapt.   

On top of the marketing and digitalization implication of this shift, there’s a moral component as well. We’re living in a golden age of mission statements. Companies love to talk about their values, but it is only by asking these fundamental questions that a company can honestly know whether it’s living up to its stated values. By asking the right questions, we bridge the chasm between saying the right things and doing the right things. I think we always have to drill down to ensure what we’re doing is good for something and, at the same time, ensure that good is clearly communicated to the customer. That’s what I’m always trying to do in this dual-role. That’s how I settle the fight between my digital and marketing selves. 

As we face the global climate change crisis, the stakes of being “all talk” have never been higher, and yet the opportunity to use technology to enable change for the better has never been greater. 

We can do all the scrums and hack-a-thons we want, but how are we helping? Where are we going, not just in terms of digitalization, but in terms of what tech can do for us and where it can take us? When we speak of integration, we must consider how our solutions integrate with broader action on climate. The OS, in this case, is the planet we live on! 

It’s no exaggeration to say that our survival depends on coming up with operating systems that are compatible with the systems that support life on this planet and working to repair the damage that human industry has caused in the past. 

In this series, I want to explore these questions in light of the current state of marketing. I want to take this conversation beyond listicles at hot-takes on the latest trends. I want to talk about where we are and where I think we’re headed, based on my experience in this dual role. I want to talk about enabling positive changes through digitalization and connecting through value and values with customer-centric marketing. 

Stay tuned ;)