Five approaches to build a customer-first marketing culture in 2026

Over the years we’ve helped many brands with the transition from being product-centric to customer-centric and we wanted to share some tips and advice for how your organisation can approach this.

We find this topic fascinating, mainly because most blogs, articles and case studies focus on the benefit of being customer-centric, for example this providing a competitive advantage or supporting organisation retention. But not many people talk about the how to be a customer-first marketing team.

This is why Natasha Milsted, founder of Marketing Moments is focusing on exploring the dynamic capabilities organisations need to anticipate and respond to changing customer needs as her MBA project. With the hope of being able to develop products that can support organisations with building customer-first marketing teams. That said we think there are easy ways that your organisation can start doing this today.

In our new series of mini blogs we will be exploring operationalising customer empathy, creating processes that encourage and use customer feedback, aligning marketing content with real customer problems, how to incentivise customer centricity, bridging the gap between marketing, sales and other functions, and the role internal comms and engagement.

Although, it often falls to the marketing team to drive forward the shift from product-centric to customer-centric, it is an organisation shift. It is a shift in how an organisation views and see the world and the strategic orientation they are choosing to take. Organisations who are customer centric have made a conscious decision to have a market orientation.

Market orientation is a business approach where an organisation prioritises understanding customer needs and desires and uses that insight to shape its products, services, and overall strategy. Instead of pushing what the company already makes, the business researches what customers actually want and adapts accordingly.

We’ve created a tag “customer-first marketing” to make it easy for you to locate the remaining blogs. Please do have a read and get in touch if you would like support with creating your own customer-first marketing culture.