• Ad Age, Tuesday, August 25, 2009 10:41 AM

Yesterday we read about Paul Polman's push to make Unilever a customer-focused organization. This morning, Jay Galbraith, founder-president of Galbraith Management Consultants, says that making the decision to organize around the customer is not to be taken lightly. Many organizations that have gone that route experience "some real and often unexpected challenges." In the end, it's the CMO's job to see the job through, from "thought leadership" to leading the execution.

One big problem is defining what you mean by customer centricity. Some companies think that they are customer-centric but aren't -- Hewlett-Packard's printer business, for example, has followed experts' advice to be customer-focused but, at the end of the day, it is still product-centric because its metric is market share.

The CMO shouldn't be standing alone amongst circled wagons, of course. "These roles of thought leader, transformation leader and matrix manager are probably the biggest challenges for the contemporary CMO," Galbraith writes. "Like many leadership roles today, there is no one individual who can play all of them simultaneously. Instead, the CMO will need to lead a team to execute customer centricity."

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