Anti customer orientation

Customer centricity, customer focus, customer orientation etc. are all concepts that are used frequently in companies today. The assumption is that it is the good, and right thing to put customers in the centre of the analysis, planning and implementation of marketing activities.

Postmodern marketers, and others, also practitioners are frustrated by the fragmentation of customers. Customers are extremely hard to track, understand and use a stable platform for planning activities. What a customer is now, can in the next moment be something different.

Therefore, it is here in this blog suggested that perhaps it is not the right thing to use customers as the starting point for marketing activities. Consumption practice may be a more stable, and even predictable starting point for being market oriented. Social practice, or consumption practice refer here to certain "ways of doing" in the customer spaces. Thus marketing is not about serving certain segments of customers, but certain segments of "doings".