Companies built on customer trust

A company’s success in business depends primarily on its intangible resources. This paradigm is common wisdom today, but I was already writing about it back in 1994, in Trust-Based Resources in the Company. In my book, I underscored how these resources take on enormous importance in the context of a company’s intangible assets. Shaped by customers’ cognitive systems, trust-based resources include company and brand image, customer loyalty, and relationships with intermediate and final customers.

Indispensable to a company’s market success, and its very survival, trust-based resources are contingent on the ability to nurture and grow customer satisfaction, as well as all the processes that underpin customer value creation. In this respect, shoring up intangible resources built on trust requires a direct link between consumption needs and production flexibility. Not only that, but the organization’s internal interconnectivity also needs to be reinforced through a common vision and shared standards that ensure customer centricity in decision-making processes.

The key is doing this is to focus on studying changes in supply and demand (the evolution of consumer behaviors; new dimensions of competition; advances in technology and sources of competitive advantage). At the same time, companies need to utilize innovative tools to measure and analyze the functional and symbolic benefits that customers are looking for: their perceptions and cognitive structures, their attitudes toward the product and how they evaluate it.

To sum up, any decision that can impact customer satisfaction (reflecting on the company’s trust-based resources) can also affect the amount of revenues and the size of cash flows, their distribution over time, their risk profile, and ultimately the value of the firm itself. For this reason, it is essential to be equipped with the right analytical tools to spot and fill the internal and external gaps that can give rise to a misalignment between the value that the firm designs and offers and the value that customers perceive and desire.

But true customer centricity is a complex goal that calls for a clear-cut strategy, the engagement of multiple corporate functions, commitment at all organizational levels, and an accurate system for measuring results. An inter-functional perspective should frame customer satisfaction analysis and management, and various corporate competences must be involved in both trouble shooting and problem solving (marketing to human resource management, R&D to production development and supply chain management).

The conceptual framework delineated here forms the foundation of the strategies that companies enact, strategies which, more and more, must be truly customer-centric. In today’s digital economy this is more critical than ever to long-term economic and market success.

Social and technological advances pave the way forward to fascinating new spaces to cultivate and explore: from interaction with customers who are more and more interconnected and proactive, to the potentialities of the data-driven economy; from building memorable experiences to managing these experiences through an omnichannel approach; from value creation through collaborative innovation to the proliferation of this value via new platforms within the context of a sharing society.

All this will sharpen the focus on customer-centricity and the marketing competences that support it. The imperative here is sustainable growth, both from an environmental and social standpoint, with everything that entails for the company: being highly attentive to any signs of change in the markets, interiorizing customers in company processes, coming up with a more attractive value proposition, in keeping with customers’ growing concern for ethics and respect for people and the environment, and centering on the authentic well-being of individuals and society. This ultimately means setting our sights once again on real, perceptible innovation, applying design thinking to anchor the brand to the only solid source of long-term success there is: the ability to offer the market a superior value proposition, one that can satisfy functional, symbolic, experiential needs of consumers, and do it better than the competition.

This objective implies constantly striving to grow, and to action processes of collaborative innovation that engage not only horizontal and vertical partners, but final customers as well. When all is said and done, the substance of a value proposition is dependent on the ability to mobilize the creativity of myriad actors. New technologies contribute to achieving this goal by helping companies create open collaborative platforms, to be used to center the brand strategy on the authentic well-being of people and society.