
Professor Peter Fader led a Discussion Forum in collaboration with IE Foundation on C-Centricity on the 8th July 2019.
Peter Fader is a Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Apart from his duties as a professor, Fader is also the co-founder of Zodiac, a predictive analytics firm, which was sold to Nike in 2018, and the Director and Co-Founder of Theta Equity Partners a startup focused on what Fader calls customer-based corporate valuation. Moreover, Fader is the author of Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage and The C-Centricity Playbook. In 2017, he was named by Advertising Age as one of its inaugural “25 Marketing Technology Trailblazers”.
During the discussion, it became apparent that companies are obsessed with innovation (how to innovate faster than others) and efficiency (operational excellence) in order to be in an advantageous position over their competitors. However, there is another challenging strategy that only a few companies will be able to implement: Customer Centricity. According to Prof. Fader, what makes the difference among companies is their ability to select the right customers, the ones who have the greatest potential profit for the future. However, this does not mean that “non-focal” customers should be ignored or “fired”. It is important to have a healthy proportion of such customers to add a high degree of stability and robustness.
This new perception of customers positions the CMO and the CFO on the same page. In other words, following Fader’s theory it could be possible to estimate the financial value of a company by predicting future customers, their spending and their churn.