I think the two situations in which "customer obsession" is a meaningful corporate value are:
a) life or death matters are involved
b) you see enough sides of a customer's life that the internal model is not a one-product cartoon (ie all the broad tech platforms)
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If you sell only one non-life-or-death product or service, chances that your customer's whole-life holistic identity is coupled to consuming your product is zero. There is no point being obsessed with a narrow aspect of someone's life that they themselves are not.
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There is something weird about the v-commerce/DTC world, in that they seem to unironically think customer identities are shaped by a single product (t-shirt, razors, shorts, luggage, backpacks, water bottles)... this is a mistake old-school marketing never made.
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When you see ads for (for eg) coca-cola or pringles, it is clear that the marketers understand this isn't your life, it's a snack. The lifestyle narratives presented in commercials has a subtext of cheerful irony/absurdity. This is missing in DTC ads I see on Facebook.
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Very few products in traditional marketing unironically positioned themselves as identitycore products. Cars perhaps. Education (college). Healthcare and insurance products.
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Amazon would argue they got to that stage because they were customer obsessed back when they were selling only books


