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Use Customer-Centric Marketing to Boost Customer Experience and Loyalty
By Leah Leachman | June 12, 2025
Why customer-centric marketing is critical to CMO success
Customer experience (CX) and understanding consistently ranks as a top capability gap for marketers. Across the U.K., U.S. and Canada, 58% of consumers feel that most companies trying to sell them products don’t understand their preferences and needs, according to the 2025 Gartner Genius Brands Report. This highlights a significant opportunity. Improving customer understanding can improve touchpoint relevance, which, in turn, can increase content and media ROI.
With 87% of CMOs saying they faced campaign performance issues in the past 12 months, marketing needs a new approach to growth. A customer-first strategy can help foster long-term loyalty, advocacy and retention.
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Customer-centric marketing offers a valuable outside-in view
Develop a deep understanding of customer drivers and critical moments within the customer journey to build relationships that drive growth and engagement.
Customer-centric marketing prioritizes customers over channels
Understanding customers’ current and shifting needs requires ongoing listening and research that weighs what customers say against how they behave. But listening to customers is only effective if the organization uses, analyzes and disseminates the insights gleaned.
Building a strategy to do so drives actions that ensure your organization delivers consistent and compelling experiences to customers and provides value to internal stakeholders. Start by finding “the who.” Gather — or strengthen — customer personas with key customer insights to build a baseline for customer-centric experience design.
Customer-centric marketing boosts customers’ confidence and control
Four in 10 consumers spend more time verifying the reliability and accuracy of brand, product and service information than they did five years ago.
Customers want to be in control of their end-to-end journey. They’re turning toward hybrid experiences — such as browsing on their phone while shopping in-store — that let them engage in ways that make them feel confident about their purchase decisions.
For each persona, look across the entire customer journey to gain context and insight into how your brand can most effectively support customers’ needs for confidence and control. Use existing customer journey maps or create new ones as needed to adapt CX design to provide confidence and clarity — regardless of channel.
Customer-centric marketing prioritizes channels based on impact and capability
Think of channels as vehicles for customer experience delivery — they are a means, not an end. Use the following factors, alongside existing criteria at your organization, to identify which channels are the most viable to deliver a strong experience.
Feasible: Are we currently equipped to deliver on the experience as promised?
Repurposable: Is this an opportunity to leverage an existing capability or channel in a new way?
Measurable: Can we assign metrics that track value for the customer and the company from our efforts?
Employee effort: Will this require a completely new workflow or skill?
Time: Can we deliver when our customers expect the experience to occur?
CX ROI: What are the potential gains and costs of execution and/or what is the cost of not executing?
As you consider each factor, strive to maintain a balance between customer-focused and company-focused criteria.
Customer-centric marketing FAQs
What is customer-centric marketing?
Customer-centric marketing is a strategic approach that prioritizes the needs and experiences of customers. It goes beyond simply promoting products or services and instead focuses on delivering value and exceptional experiences. By understanding and meeting customers’ unique needs, customer-centric marketing aims to build strong relationships and foster loyalty.
How does a customer-centric marketing approach have a positive impact on the customer experience (CX) and commercial results?
Customer-centric marketing exploits the drivers that improve customer retention and lifetime value by addressing what increases customer dissatisfaction and attrition. The insights gained from a customer-centric marketing approach help shape tools such as personas and journey maps, enabling customer-centric decisions and well-orchestrated experiences. CX performance is linked to revenue growth. According to the 2024 Gartner Customer Experience Survey, 92% percent of CX leaders — defined as respondents whose organization’s CX program meets their customer needs and overperforms against CX target metrics — reported that their company’s revenue increased from FY23 to FY24, versus only 50% of trailing organizations (organizations that do not meet customer needs and underperform against CX target metrics).
What is the best way to implement a successful customer-centric marketing strategy?
Work with key stakeholders to improve customer understanding and loyalty by seeking to fully understand the needs, goals and desired outcomes for target customers. Consolidate these insights and align them to the customer journey by identifying the stages and potential experiences that benefit both the brand and the customer. Then prioritize channel investments based on where your company is best positioned to deliver the desired experience.
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