six
Forget Company-Centricity—Think Human-Centricity

Peter Drucker once said that the single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that there are no results inside its walls—the result of a business is a satisfied customer. We businesspeople get so absorbed in our own world that we start thinking of our products, services, and companies as the center of the universe (and in fact, they are often the center of our universe). As we talk about the space we live in day in and day out, we start suffering from the curse of insular knowledge, with the result that few people outside of the company, other than a few industry insiders, have a clue of what we’re talking about.

In addition, companies often develop jargon, specifications, and categories of products largely from their own perspective, not from the vantage point of potential customers. Consider, for instance, how a multidivisional technology company may market printers, computers, and monitors as separate products on separate Web sites, although the customer may consider the products to be so linked that they are one integrated purchase. Products are often designed, named, and priced not as a result of external input, but rather as an outcome of what the company has done before or what influential internal groups have required. It seems as though even in our personal lives, the company comes first. Indeed, history shows us that game-changing, disruptive products are suppressed not because they are not what the customers want, but rather because they are exactly what customers want, and so they threaten existing corporate power structures.

Once upon a time, there were no corporations—the legal profession and the business community had to create the “legal fiction” concept of a corporation to make it sufficiently analogous to a human, i.e., an entity that is able to sue and be sued. Once created, corporations became almost super-beings, with the potential to outlive their creators and their critics alike. Management structures became aristocracies of sorts, where power was handed down from one generation to another, and the supremacy of the company over the individuals who managed it was rarely questioned. “Company men,” as loyal workers are still known, were expected to subjugate themselves to the interests of the company, and willingly did so. Indeed, legal principles were developed that created a “fiduciary relationship” between many managers and the abstract companies they work for; in plain terms, these executives are legally required to act with the best interests of the corporation (and not their own) in mind. They have become servants of the corporation.

Considering this long history and acculturation, it is no wonder that most companies’ management and owners believe that in all interactions with others (be they customers, employees, or business partners), the same rule should apply—the company comes first. Indeed, we should clarify that this book is not about helping companies leverage the new tools of human Hyper-Sociality to gain some sort of advantage over their customers or employees. Our message is starkly different: you must understand and leverage Hyper-Sociality if you are to properly connect with, and delight, your customers and your employees, which should be your goal.

Simply put, by becoming Hyper-Social, you will benefit the humans with whom you interact, and in doing so, your company will gain much. As a result of conducting the Tribalization of Business Study and studying scores of companies’ attempts to navigate the Hyper-Social shift, we believe that the failure to be human-centric is the most commonly breached of the Four Pillars of Hyper-Sociality, as we will discuss in Chapter 9, and one of the greatest challenges that organizations face.

Human-Centricity

First let us consider what “human-centricity” means. In essence, it is seeking, first and foremost, to direct all company activities and decisions toward providing value to the humans who are the company’s customers, employees, or business partners. For instance, when someone attempts to order a book that she has previously purchased from Amazon, the order system will remind her that she already purchased that book. From a traditional sales perspective, that is probably a terrible policy: if the person wants to give your company more money, why would you create any impediment to that transaction? From a Hyper-Social perspective, though, reminding someone that she might have forgotten that she’d already ordered that book is exactly what people expect from a member of their tribe. If there’s going to be someone who is given the benefit of the doubt or cut a break, a human-centric company will extend that break first to the customer, not the company. It also means that the qualities that matter most to humans and that make them feel best, such as fairness, transparency, respect, openness, and the opportunity to help and be helped, will be practiced throughout the organization.

Given that human-centricity, not company-centricity, is one of the Four Pillars of Hyper-Sociality, the typical manager’s inability to embrace the concept has the potential to materially suspend the move toward Hyper-Sociality. Unfortunately, too many executives put company-centric philosophies at the center of their corporate social environments (such as their communities). Of the Four Pillars, human-centricity vs. company-centricity is the one where corporate culture is most clearly implicated. Accordingly, it’s no surprise that trying to move the organization ahead on this thinking often pits change agents against the inertia of corporate culture. But on the other hand, if and when human-centricity becomes embedded in your corporate culture, it will become an enduring strength, passed from employee to employee, that competitors will find difficult to duplicate.

Let’s consider again the myopia that many of us suffer when we work for company-centric organizations. As a result of our working in these companies, we often think that our brand is more important than it probably is, and that consumers view our company through a brand or product lens. Consider this: Human prospects rarely think of products as the center of their universe, and while some companies babble about their products using all the fashionable industry buzzwords, their customers use much simpler terms to talk about the same products. And when people are talking about a company’s products, they’re much more likely to be speaking with others with whom they’ve developed some sort of affinity (i.e., members of the same tribe) than with someone from the company. In a Hyper-Social world, it is not about the company or its products; it is about how the company should subordinate itself to what the tribes around it use the company for. Sometimes it is a product that solves a problem or fills a need. Other times, it’s a product that lets the tribe discuss related issues and ideas that interest it. But it’s very unlikely to be the hallowed product itself.

Factors That Stand in the Way of Human-Centricity

The historical bias toward company-centricity and away from human-centricity is perpetuated by a number of factors. One key factor is that the most influential functions within organizations are inherently company-centric. For instance, legal departments are typically oriented in a fiduciary relationship with the company, and they seek to resolve every contingency and unintended consequence that may arise in favor of the organization, not the human employees or customers. Indeed, legal representatives have little discretion in this regard; they are sworn guardians of their clients’ interests, and in the perceived zero-sum world of competing interests, if I let the customer “win,” I have caused my client to lose.

Company-drafted “terms of use” that control participation in most online communities, for instance, often provide clear illustrations of the legal department’s bias against acting Hyper-Socially. Indeed, there is little customer voice expressed in the terms of use—if you examine the terms, you’ll see that there is little evidence of a customer advocate’s voice. In addition, the public relations function typically is not a key advocate of human-centricity. “Spinning” communications to persuade, as opposed to reaching a better understanding with, external human stakeholders is often demonstrative of poor Hyper-Sociality. This contrasts dramatically with the viewpoint of the CEO of Mozilla, a company that clearly has shifted closer to human-centricity:

So when some significant part of the community gets upset, we pay a lot of attention. Sometimes our responses are defensive at first, but I think we’re pretty good at opening up. It’s pretty interesting to look at what somebody is complaining about and find the truth behind that. We also try to be very low spin. In fact, sometimes we joke that we’re negative spin. We don’t need the press or anybody else to do that; we’ll do it ourselves.1

This inquisitiveness about customer complaints, a genuine desire to understand what it is that has upset the customer, is a human-centric trait that a number of Hyper-Social companies demonstrate. They are not challenged by an upset stakeholder, or repelled by antiproduct or anticompany sentiment. On the contrary, Hyper-Social organizations seem to be driven to understand why there has been a disconnect between the value that the organization thought it should be delivering to the customer, and what the customer felt was actually delivered. Hyper-Social organizations view these exceptions as key learning experiences, as opposed to regrettable but explainable outliers among their typically very satisfied customer base.

Other factors that stand in the way of human-centricity include efficiency-centricity and the simple fact that the customer has often had no forum where his voice could be clearly heard. Historically, efficient corporate operations have often required bureaucracy and strict policies that concomitantly placed the interests of the corporation above those of the humans it transacted business with. Customers had to accept delivery, payment, or return policies so that the company could manage complex systems in the most efficient (and cost-effective) manner. Because of the limitations imposed by communications infrastructure, distance, and lack of feedback systems, large organizations frequently had a limited ability to understand their customers’ desires and needs, and to place these in the center of their business operations. For instance, unless there was a massive boycott, the distant corporate executives might have no idea how displeased some customers had become. Diminishing market share or revenues might be the first nonspecific notification of dissatisfied customers that the managers received, and they probably got it months after the fact.

Acting in that same traditional company-centric fashion in today’s new Hyper-Social world, however, is a strategy that is fraught with disaster. The evidence lies in a virtual landscape littered with dead online communities whose companies did not put humans and their tribes at the center of their efforts. These unsuccessful attempts at interacting with Hyper-Social communities serve as petri dishes of a sort, where customer colonies failed to thrive despite significant amounts of corporate investment and attention. As we have argued throughout this book, in order to become Hyper-Social, organizations need to put humans and their tribes at the center of every business process, decision, and policy. And organizations need to always remember that sometimes the human is a customer or prospect, and at other times the human might be an employee.

As a result, if your organization’s communities and other social media are about you and your products, people will not drop by in the first place, or they may come once and never come back. In fact, the Tribalization of Business Study indicates that the “company” aspects of online communities are far less important to humans than being able to connect with like-minded people, to discuss hot topics, or to be able to help and be helped. The context of the conversation has to be about the humans, what makes them tick, and what makes them want to hang out with one another.

A popular online parenting community found out what happens when corporate goals trump the wishes of the actual members of the community.2 In order to make room for advertising, the sponsoring organization reformatted the site and altered the arrangement of blog posts in a way that greatly upset community members. Despite a groundswell of demand for a return to the old format, the sponsoring organization did not heed the tribe’s requests. Within a week, disgruntled tribe members created a replica of the beloved legacy community, and the new community soon enjoyed a multiple of the traffic that the original site was experiencing.

Our research has also uncovered a potential pitfall worth noting in shifting companies toward greater human-centricity. Many companies are applying return on investment (ROI) metrics to social media in a way that has them thinking in terms of, “What is this investment doing for me?” as opposed to, “How can I improve the value for the customer? What can I do now for my customer that I couldn’t do in the past? How can I use the participatory nature of Web 2.0 tools to improve the customer experience?” Would online retailers, applying that logic, ever have permitted candid, uncensored online reviews of products that they sell, knowing that they might lose some sales as customers discussed product benefits and shortcomings? To these retailers’ credit, they eventually did adopt this measure of customer-centricity, but only after the ROI of not doing so became very hard to articulate.

Steps to Becoming More Human-Centric

Fortunately, the successes of some pioneering Hyper-Social companies indicate the steps that companies can take to become more human-centric. Key actions include being responsive to customers’ suggestions, criticisms, and questions and having strong moderators managing the communications between tribe and organization. Permitting detractors within the tribe to speak their mind and providing access to competitors’ information or products that might be valuable to the tribe are common steps that organizations take to shift the bias from company-centricity to human-centricity. Permitting the members of the tribe to boost their reputations or status in the context of the tribe, perhaps by recognizing particularly helpful or competent members, is another common feature organizations add that help to position the humans as preeminent.

Now granted, there are some cases in which you will be able to get away with a little more company-centricity. If your goal is to gain market insights into your new product innovation process, then you probably can get by with a smaller community of people who are primarily focused on your products—something that they care about. If your goal is to both gain market insight and leverage Hyper-Sociality as part of your word-of-mouth efforts, however, it is unlikely that you will be able to achieve that with a focus-group-like community centered on your products.

Truly Hyper-Social companies put customer-centricity into much more than their social initiatives. They extend customer-centricity to their

Image Value proposition. Instead of being product-centric, a value proposition needs to become consumer-centric. Look to position your offering as a customer-centric solution, not as a set of features, functions, and benefits. Tribes often use products or services for reasons other than the simple features or benefits of those products or services. They will use products, for instance, that they believe raise their status in the community. People who drive hybrid-technology cars are probably interested in saving money on gas, but they also happily pay a “hybrid premium” on the purchase of the car. This contradiction indicates that there is probably another motive in their purchase: broadcasting their concern about the environment, and their willingness to invest in improving the environment, to the people around them.

Image Brands. Most brands are product- or company-centric. They need to become customer-centric. Do companies really think that most customers are highly concerned with how accurate their luxury watch is, especially when they can buy a perfect timekeeper dirt cheap? The real question is, how do people feel about themselves in the context of your brand? Do they look cool, smart, or informed? That is what really counts, and it is what they are probably interested in doing as they interact on luxury watch online forums.3

Image Focus groups. Focus groups are usually “focused” on the product itself or the company. They need to become customer-centric and understand why that tribe finds your products so engaging. Ideally, a company will derive insights from ongoing customer communities instead of having focus groups, and won’t run those communities as focus groups.

Image Product platforms. These are important, but in addition to them, companies now need to look for customer platforms. Customer platforms focus multibusiness, diverse companies not on a particular product, channel, or internally generated view of the market, but rather on customers and their tribes. Goods and services are then delivered to those customers on their terms, rather than in the ways that corporate legacy platforms formerly dictated. When a company as diverse as GE can find consumer platforms in addition to product platforms, which is what Beth Comstock, GE’s global CMO, told us in a recent interview, that means that most other companies can find them too.

Again, if a company wants to become Hyper-Social, it needs to put the Hyper-Social engine—humans and their tribes—at the center of everything it does. But this begs the question, what’s in human-centricity for the company? As we discuss at various points throughout the book, the benefits of becoming Hyper-Social accrue in many places across your company. First, moving to human-centricity begins to shift the corporate culture to one that’s truly customer-centric. In addition, the shift in attention to the human elements of your business can help to improve product development, marketing, sales, talent management, knowledge management, and customer service (as we will discuss in upcoming chapters).

Becoming human-centric also creates new knowledge flows for the company that may not have existed in the past. For instance, if everyone at your company began receiving daily reports on the top social media opinions expressed about your company, its brands, and its executives, instead of just monthly market share or sales data, wouldn’t this transparency profoundly affect decision making across various groups? Wouldn’t it provide customer support with insights into how that function could be improved? Wouldn’t such knowledge improve the planning, pricing, and promotion of your next product? Wouldn’t it give your salespeople new ideas on new segments (think tribes) that they should be targeting?

And these are just a few of the potential benefits to the organization from putting human-centricity above company-centricity. Since you are appealing to Human 1.0 sociality by putting humans at the center of your corporate efforts, word of mouth about your company and its products may well increase. This is especially valuable, since it has been shown that word-of-mouth marketing is typically much more effective than conventional marketing.4 Moreover, your company’s voice within the tribe may well enjoy greater authenticity and credibility as your human-centric organization proves to be clearly committed to providing value equal to or greater than the value that people are seeking in return.

Given that this human-centricity is nothing more than what most companies already pay lip service to (putting the consumer at the middle of everything they do), you should explore how existing programs can be used to move your company in the direction of human-centricity. You may also consider doing what some companies have done: create the role of “chief commercial officer” or “chief customer officer.” This is a senior role where a respected manager is given the task of serving as a customer advocate of sorts. Upon reflection, it is curious that, given the importance of the customer, no leader has yet been appointed in the C-suite to look out for this critical stakeholder.

Another step in the right direction of putting customers at the center of its corporate activities has been the creation of the “chief culture officer.” Grant McCracken, author of Chief Culture Officer and researcher at MIT, notes that corporations need to extract value from the zeitgeist, from the outside world, and deliver that to customers. In McCracken’s view, this newly identified executive needs to “know culture, both its fads and fashions, and its deep enduring structures” both to serve the customer, as well as to protect the corporation from unanticipated cultural shifts. Without a chief culture officer, McCracken observes that the corporation “lives in a perpetual state of surprise, waiting for the next big storm to hit.”5 Given the new social media tools available to the corporation, and its ability to better understand the external culture through many new touchpoints, the time indeed appears right for the rise of the chief culture officer to use this newfound understanding of the culture to help company and customer alike.

Summary

In this chapter, we show how the Hyper-Social organization is customer-centric, not self-centric. While most organizations espouse the importance of the customer (and the employee), and many probably truly believe that they need to be human-centric and not company-centric, few organizations have taken sufficient steps in that direction. There are a number of reasons for this inertia, but careful self-examination quickly shows organizations how they can improve their human-centricity. For instance, are there customer advocates in the organization who are fighting to break company-centric mindsets? Does the organization willingly share information and value with its customers, or does it attempt to use information asymmetry against its customers? Is the relationship with customers and employees viewed in a zero-sum way, where value derived by customers or employees necessarily diminishes the organization’s gains?