A Call for Brand Focus, Not Customer Obsession

One of today’s most popular business mindsets is also the first of four core values Jeff Bezos credits much of Amazon’s success—customer obsession. They first coined the term in their shareholder letter 26 years ago. Since then, they’ve become a poster child for the mindset. And it's grown to become a business buzzword, attracting companies to its lure like moths to a flame.

On the surface, customer obsession has become a boardroom-safe mindset to tout. I believe anyone who champions it either doesn’t understand what it means beyond a surface-level understanding or does know and figure they'll never be fired for suggesting something that sounds so positive. After all, what executive wouldn’t want to hear that their company is obsessing about their customers? 

However, buyer beware. Just because it sounds good doesn't mean it is. In the end, it carries a lot of danger as it’s a hollow idea that does more to hurt a company and its customers than to help. What do I mean? 

When you embrace this mindset, you must also accept the definition of obsession, meaning “to preoccupy or fill the mind of continually, intrusively, and to a troubling extent.” For Amazon, that troubling extent and dark side of obsession mean ruthlessly exploiting their warehouse workers, using transaction data to undermine small businesses, and polluting the climate at record levels. Sadly, these behaviors don’t stop with Amazon; more and more companies are garnering headlines due to its harmful effects.

Simply put, this mindset is so troubling because it is not financially or operationally feasible for a company to satisfy all desires of all its customers at scale. Companies that embrace it may appear successful on the surface, but look past the glitzy PR that aims to redirect attention to financial success, new product innovation, or attempts to marginalize its effects, and you can see straight through to its havoc.

You can usually tell companies that claim customer obsession as they anxiously and constantly shift tactics, priorities, strategies, and plans to align to the "next" thing the customer needs or demands. When you turn the looking glass to the employees, you often find them frustrated, bullied and intimidated, burning out, or outright abused as they try to understand how best to support ever-changing goals, targets, and strategies based on customer needs. 

Sadly, in the end, companies who adhere to customer obsession lose sight of who they are as a brand and increasingly become more commoditized while confusing their customers in the process. And ultimately, they miss the chance to do the one thing they set out to do by adopting this mindset: connect with and support their customers more meaningfully.

So if customer obsession isn’t the answer, what is? I’d call us to (or, to return to) the mindset of brand focus. Here are two ways we can start.

Define Your Brand Position and Purpose

You must start with a solid foundation, like any architecturally sound building. A foundation supports everything built on top of it. You can consider a brand position and purpose as part of your foundation. It sets the direction of the rest of your company by answering questions like, who your company is, what makes it unique/differentiated, what values you hold to, etc. 

Successful brands are not everything to everyone, and brand positioning and purpose look to outline that tangibly, giving you a lens to see and focus. And just as important as a position denotes "I claim this area," it also indicates what areas you do not claim. At Studio Science, one of our favorite examples to illustrate this point is The French Laundry versus Waffle House. While each has its appeal, they have different positions, customers, values, etc.—and they operate the rest of their business against those and appear as distinct and ownable brands. Every company needs to lean into its position (who they are and what makes it unique) and execute from that as the foundation, not the ever-changing needs of its customers. 

Design Your Organizational Culture

Today’s fast-growing tech companies focus on monitoring many things: active users, sales numbers, recurring customer satisfaction, revenue, etc. But I’d offer that a company’s culture should also be a critical metric that’s watched. This is especially true for companies that adhere to customer obsession (or even its less evil cousin, customer centricity). As my colleague Justin Zalewski pointed out in his whitepaper, aligning customer experience and employee experience is critical to producing results that one-sided mindsets cannot achieve.

But before you rush to begin measuring, I’d step back and start designing your organization for success. (Besides, while administering surveys and questionnaires is a step in the right direction, they are often unreliable as people often behave differently in the real world versus the survey data they provide.) While there are many frameworks, one of the most time-tested models for designing your organization is Jay Galbraith’s Star Model. It focuses on five different aspects:

• Strategy aligns the team and answers questions like:
  What are your strategic goals? How do they drive the business model?

• Structure determines the place where authority resides, and answers questions like:
  What type of organizational structure does your business model require?

• Process directs the flow of information and management, and answers questions like:
  What information flows, processes and workflows does your business model require?

• Rewards aligns employee goals with the goals of the organization and answers questions like:
  What reward system does your business model require? How can you motivate your people?

• People focuses on growing skills and mindsets and answers questions like:
  What kinds of people with what skills does your business model require? What type of mindset is needed?

If you’d like to learn more about designing your organization to align your customer and employee experience better, send me a note.

In the end, the problem with customer obsession and many “new” mindsets or strategies today is that they aren’t grounded in the definition of who your company is or what it stands for. They do more to erode that than support it. 

But by focusing (or re-focusing) your efforts and relating to people through who you are (your brand and culture), you can position your company for sustained growth and foster even closer relationships with everyone who comes into contact with it.