Computer-Assisted Concept Analysis of Customer Centricity: A Review of the Literature on Employee Engagement, Culture, Leadership, and Identity Co-Creation

Abstract

Customer centricity requires having customers at the core of the corporate organizational process. Yet, relationship marketing scholarships have not developed a clear understanding of how corporate culture, leadership, and identity may allow the establishment of customer centricity within the organization. To this aim, we have developed a computer-assisted concept analysis of the term customer centricity in two disciplines that are at the core of relationship marketing: business and psychology. Specifically, we have conducted our review of a sample of abstracts in the over 1200 peer-reviewed journals of Business Source Premier Database and 2500 publications at the Psychology Info database that use the term “customer centricity” together with the terms “organizational identity”, “organizational leadership”, “organizational culture”, and “employee engagement”. Our computer-assisted analysis allowed us to identify four main open debates scholars and practitioners are working on that contribute to advance literature on relationship marketing: employee training and balanced centricity; industries that are either best or worst practices; reinvention of marketing practices; social aspects of consumer centricity. These areas are presented considering how they might inspire future studies on customer centricity in the customer relationship marketing field.