How B2B Firms Can Transform Strategy Through Customer Insight, Organizational Alignment, and Leadership Commitment
UM6P Impact Series #14
In an era marked by intensifying competition, rapid digital transformation, and increasingly demanding customers, B2B organizations are under growing pressure to rethink how they create and deliver value. Moving from product-centric logics to customer-centric strategies is no longer a rhetorical aspiration—it is becoming a strategic necessity. In this interview, Dr. Nouha Berrada, Professor of Marketing & Strategy, and Dr. Kofi Osei-Frimpong, Associate Professor of Marketing, both at UM6P’s ABS, discuss insights from their research on how B2B organizations can successfully embed customer centricity.
Based on multiple case studies, their work identifies the drivers, enablers, and barriers shaping customer-centric transformation and offers a practical strategic roadmap for managers navigating competitive pressure and digital change.
Why it Matters
Why is customer centricity such a critical strategic shift for B2B organizations today?
Customer centricity is now a core route to competitive advantage in technologically driven, hypercompetitive B2B and B2C markets. This strategy aligns B2B firms’ offerings with what high-value customers actually need, improves segmentation and experience design, and delivers measurable outcomes (e.g., higher margins, loyalty, streamlined processes).
Our study underscores that while customer centricity is difficult to operationalize because it reshapes organisational culture, structures, and execution simultaneously, it remains a powerful pathway to sustainable growth and differentiation in B2B markets.
Beyond the Buzzword
What does your research reveal about what customer centricity means in practice ?
In practice, customer centricity is both a strategy and a culture. This allows businesses to discover, prioritize, and meet heterogeneous customer needs across the journey. This is essentially supported by cross-functional collaboration, customer knowledge integration, and a clear customer-focused strategic vision.
It means moving from “product excellence” as the organizing logic to customer value realization as the operating system. This approach helps create a balanced model combining operational excellence, product leadership, and customer centricity.
Method & Evidence
How did your multiple case study approach help uncover insights that might otherwise remain hidden?
We used a qualitative multiple-case design across two contrasting B2B firms, collecting 22 senior-manager interviews (global coverage), two cross-functional focus groups, and observations from three customer-centricity workshops, alongside expert interactions.
This layered dataset allowed us to triangulate strategy talk, middle-layer realities, and real implementation, surfacing hidden frictions such as low internal awareness and rigid decision gates that quantitative survey research often misses.
Key Insights
Among the triggers, enablers, and barriers you identified, which do you consider the most surprising or impactful?
Four drivers: varying customer preferences, competitive pressure, technology/innovation, and internationalization.
- Formulation enablers: departmental integration, employees’ perceptions (mindset), collaborative B2B relationships, supportive culture, customer knowledge, and a customer-focused strategic vision.
- Formulation barriers: entrenched product-centric logics, rigid decision systems, and efficiency/quality/cost optimization dominating the agenda.
- Implementation enablers: leadership support, employee empowerment, and managing customer voice heterogeneity.
- Implementation barriers: weak management commitment and poor inter-department cohesion.
What is most surprising — and consequential — is that the very capabilities B2B firms prize (operational excellence, quality, cost discipline) often become strategy blockers to customer centricity. Product-first logics and efficiency-led KPIs crowd out customer-outcome decisions, resulting in margin pressure, feature-led competition, and stalled transformation.
Unless leaders rethink decision systems, metrics, and incentives, operational strengths will continue optimizing internal efficiency rather than customer-led growth.
Theory Meets Practice
How do institutional theory and relational exchange theory deepen our understanding of customer-centric strategies?
By integrating institutional theory and relational exchange theory, we explain both the why and the how:
- Why adopt? : External expectations and industry pressures from regulators, standards, and competitors push firms to signal customer centricity.
- How succeed? : Trust, commitment, collaboration, continuous feedback, joint problem-solving, and knowledge sharing convert adoption into real practice.
This integration clarifies why many firms signal customer centricity yet under-deliver: they conform institutionally but under-invest in relational capabilities.
Practical Value
What is the most important actionable lesson for managers who want to embed customer centricity?
Single most important lesson: treat customer centricity as an operating transformation, not a campaign. Rewire three systems in parallel:
- Governance & metrics — Make customer outcomes decisive by embedding customer-voice and journey metrics into steering agendas and incentives.
- Cross-functional execution — Organize around priority customer problems with shared goals and end-to-end accountability.
- Employee empowerment — Equip frontline teams with real-time data and clear mandates to resolve issues and improve experiences on the spot.
Breaking Barriers
Why do rigid decision-making and product-centric mindsets persist — and how can firms overcome them?
They persist because legacy KPIs, budgeting gates, and efficiency routines reinforce product-centric thinking, while decision rights remain highly centralized.
To overcome this:
- Redesign decision systems to accelerate customer-issue resolution.
- Recode success metrics by balancing efficiency KPIs with NPS, CSAT, and customer lifetime value.
- Pilot and scale high-impact customer journeys with cross-functional ownership, then replicate what works.
Emerging Markets Perspective
How do your findings apply to firms in Africa and other emerging economies?
The findings apply directly, with a strong emphasis on localization and agility. Customer needs differ across countries and sub-regions, making customer-voice heterogeneity management a first-order capability.
Internationalization heightens the need for localized solutions and data-enabled customization, while the biggest obstacle remains internal: product-centric logics and rigid approval systems. Empowering teams with clear decision rights, timely customer information, and visible leadership commitment is essential.
The Road Ahead
How will customer centricity in B2B evolve over the next decade?
B2B customer centricity will become a proactive operating system. Firms will use AI, CRM, and analytics to read diverse customer voices and trigger real-time responses, deploying technology to co-create solutions, not just chase efficiency.
Execution will be end-to-end, regionally adaptive, and structurally embedded, shifting KPIs from product metrics to adoption, retention, and renewals. With visible leadership commitment and empowered teams, firms can break internal inertia and move from “what’s easy for us” to “what works for customers.”
Your Vision
If you could share one big idea that captures the value of your research, what would it be?
Customer centricity wins only when it moves from a declared strategy to a re-architected system”.
The breakthrough lies in aligning institutional pressures (the why) with relational mechanisms (the how), and hard-wiring both into governance, culture, data, and everyday work. That is how B2B firms turn heterogeneous customer voices into sustained, scalable value.
Looking Ahead
This research highlights that customer centricity in B2B is not a surface-level initiative, but a deep organizational transformation. Moving beyond product-centric routines requires rethinking decision systems, performance metrics, and cross-functional coordination, while ensuring that customer insights inform strategy and execution alike.
By identifying the drivers, enablers, and barriers that shape both formulation and implementation, Dr. Nouha Berrada and Dr. Kofi Osei-Frimpong offer a practical roadmap for organizations seeking to embed customer centricity in a sustainable way. Their work underscores a clear message: customer-led growth emerges when institutional pressures are aligned with relational capabilities, and when customer outcomes become central to how organizations operate, decide, and evolve.
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