Customer-Centric Marketing is a Myth

How we often disguise business objectives as customer needs.

Let's Drop the Act

Let's start with an uncomfortable truth: your customers don't care about your brand purpose.

They don’t wake up thinking about your segmentation strategy, your quarterly campaigns, or how cleverly you’ve named your tiers. They care about getting through the day. They care about joy, ease, meaning, and time. They care about their kids, taking care of their parents, and feeling part of a social group.

And yet, “customer-centricity” is the most overused and under-questioned strategy in modern business. Everyone champions it earnestly; few practice it honestly.

The Empathy Illusion

Let's get real: Most of the time, "customer-centricity" is just marketing theater. It's a neat trick we use to dress up business goals so they sound thoughtful, empathetic, or god forbid, human (another overused buzzword at every marketing conference I’ll talk about another time).

Because here's the truth no one wants to admit: Brand marketers aren’t waking up at 3 AM worrying about how to deeply understand customer aspirations. They're waking up worried about hitting their quarterly numbers. They're waking up anxious about hitting sales targets, proving that they’re valuable to the business, and delivering results. They're waking up stressed because the deck is due in six hours, and research still hasn’t come back. When it does, it’s like finding a needle in a haystack.

This isn't cynicism, it's survival.

I remember one meeting vividly. A marketer told me with absolute sincerity that customers desperately "needed" a 15% discount on a certain product. Sounds nice, right? Until I remembered that literally one month earlier, the same product had been on sale for 20% off.

“Why do they need 15% now?” I asked, trying to keep a straight face.

“The customer just needs an incentive,” they replied earnestly.

But here's the kicker: when I dug into their targeting, they were explicitly removing people who'd bought the product during the previous, better promotion. So naturally, I asked again:

"If it's so critical, why exclude people who already expressed interest?"

They paused, sighed, and admitted the real reason: "Honestly? The promo was already approved, the campaign was built, and we had to send something. We just have to keep people engaged."

Translation: it wasn't customer-centric at all. It was business-centric, stakeholder-centric, pressure-centric. It was theater.

And that's the issue, in technicolor. When our strategic "insights" are basically "let's do whatever we can to drive a quick click," we end up training our teams and our customers to expect nothing deeper than transactional relevance. The relationship with those customers becomes frought and our emails, texts, go right to the trash.

Eventually, we lose sight of what "customer needs" even means. The language of empathy becomes corporate jargon, and genuine insight becomes just another checkbox on the deck you send upstairs.

A Better Way to Matter

Now, imagine a world where marketers start by asking the question "why?" Not just to poke holes or kill ideas, but to dig deep into what genuinely motivates people. Why should they care, not just about this week’s promo, but about your business at all?

The real opportunity is to tear down the façade and rebuild marketing from the ground up: experiences centered around lasting value, genuine relevance, and authentic human connection. It's about moving beyond the quick-hit dopamine rush of a discount and instead creating meaningful moments that stick.

Sure, it's scary. Yes, it's definitely more work. But here's the truth: putting in the effort now means saving yourself, and your customers, from endless headaches later.

Take Duolingo as an example. Instead of merely selling language lessons, they realized people crave daily routines, playful accountability, and small wins that feel big. By tapping into the fundamental human desire to feel productive, connected, and entertained, even while doing something difficult like learning a new language, Duolingo built experiences so addictive people brag about keeping their "streaks" alive. It's quirky, oddly compelling, and completely tuned into how people genuinely think and feel.

When you lead with real understanding and genuine curiosity, the rest gets easier. Customer loyalty stops being a tactical goal and becomes an earned reality. Loyalty is an outcome, not an objective.