The concept of customer centricity and its benefits have been discussed for more than 50 years. Despite this fact, many firms are still struggling to fully align themselves to the customer-centric paradigm. This article identifies fundamental issues and challenges that typically deter a firm from becoming customer-centric. These are mainly related to the organizational culture, structure, processes, and financial metrics of the firm. To overcome these barriers, the article suggests a path to customer centricity that is driven by a strong leadership commitment, organizational realignment, systems and process support, and revised financial metrics. The article concludes with directions for further research.

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Can a marketer drive the stock price of the firm? Yes, it should be possible. Toward this endeavor, the authors develop a framework to link customer equity (CE) (as determined by the customer lifetime value metric) to market capitalization (MC) (as determined by the stock price of the firm). The authors test the framework in an empirical field experiment with two Fortune 1000 firms in the business-to-business and business-to-consumer contexts, respectively. The findings show that (1) a CE-based framework can reliably predict the MC of the firm and (2) marketing strategies directed at increasing the CE not only increase the stock price of the firm but also beat market expectations. Furthermore, the results indicate that the relationship between CE and MC is moderated by risk factors in the form of volatility and vulnerability of cash flows from customers. By accounting for these factors, the authors improve the association between CE and MC. The findings broaden the scope and role of marketing while reinforcing the importance of the marketer to any organization.

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