Despite the relevant attention paid both by the academic and by the practitioner communities, extant understanding and knowledge about how to implement customer centricity is substantially scarce. The author draws on the occasional literature on customer centricity published over the last years in marketing and other disciplines, and on 43 field interviews with managers (marketers and non-marketers), consultants and academicians to move toward the establishment of a customer centricity theory. This work identifies and refines the domain of customer centricity, defines customer centricity under an operational viewpoint and provides a comprehensive framework for grounding further research on the topic, through the deepening of the personal, organizational, inter-organizational and instrumental antecedents of the adoption of a customer-centric strategy. The work concludes with managerial implications suggesting that, despite the enthusiasm around customer centricity, a thorough analysis of the contextual factors must be carried out to understand whether to be customer-centric or not. Further, some organizational and supply-chain implications are discussed.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate the perceived exposure of fashion consumers to different types of fashion brands’ social media marketing (SMM) actions in social media, and its relationship with the intention to engage in electronic word-of-mouth (eWoM) behaviors.Design/methodology/approach: The empirical study uses a survey conducted on a stratified random sample of 241 Indonesian members of fashion social media brand communities (SMBCs). The research design includes 19 types of SMM actions and 3 types of eWoM engagement behaviors, and investigates their relationship using point-biserial correlation.Findings: Generation of intention to engage in “pass-on” and “endorsement” eWoM has different drivers and serves different purposes. The findings suggest that endorsement engagement is contingent on the consumer’s perceived exposure to marketing action stimuli, while pass-on engagement is driven by cognitive-inducing actions.Research limitations/implications: This study extends current theory on SMM strategy and its relationship with eWoM engagement with a theoretically grounded conceptualization of eWoM engagement behaviors through the use of one-click social plug-ins.Practical implications: The study offers guidelines for fashion brands to effectively design their SMM strategies by identifying specific drivers of consumers’ intention to engage in eWoM.Originality/value: This study identifies sources of generation of eWoM engagement behavioral intention from a fine-grained analysis of marketing actions across various fashion SMBCs. Besides, it extends the applicability of the “mere exposure” effect to the SMM context. The research pioneers the study on fashion consumers’ eWoM engagement behaviors in Indonesia, a country with one of the largest social media populations.

Despite the increasing and ubiquitous use of social media for business activities, scholar research on social media marketing strategy is scant and companies deploy their social media marketing strategies guided by intuition or trial and error. This study proposes a comprehensive framework that identifies and classifies social media marketing strategic actions. The conceptual framework covers actions that support both transactional and relationship marketing. The study also positions social media marketing strategy and strategic actions in the context of the marketing organization theory, and discusses the impact of the incorporation of social media on the concept of marketing organization. The study provides valuable theoretical insight on social media marketing actions and the deployment of social media marketing strategies in companies. The study also provides hints about how to maximize the benefits from social media marketing for customer-oriented, market-driven organizations = A pesar de la ubicuidad y aumento del uso de los medios de redes sociales (medios sociales, o social media) en actividades empresariales, la investigación académica sobre las estrategias de marketing en medios sociales aún es limitada, y en la mayoría de las ocasiones las empresas implementan sus estrategias de medios sociales guiadas por la intuición o a través de ensayo y error. Este estudio propone un marco amplio y completo para la identificación y clasificación de acciones estratégicas de marketing de medios sociales. El marco conceptual cubre acciones que dan soporte tanto a marketing transaccional como relacional. La presente investigación sitúa la estrategia de marketing de medios sociales y las acciones estratégicas de marketing usadas en redes sociales en el contexto de la teoría de la organización de marketing, y analiza el impacto de la incorporación de los medios socales en el concepto de organización de marketing. El estudio ofrece una valiosa perspectiva teórica acerca de las acciones de marketing en medios sociales y la implementación de estrategias de marketing de medios sociales en empresas. El análisis también ofrece indicaciones sobre cómo maximizar los beneficios asociados al marketing de medios sociales en organizaciones orientadas al mercado y al consumidor