This article was taken from a presentation for the Product Marketing Festival, 2021 by Christopher Hines, when he was the Director of Product Marketing at Zscaler. He is now the VP of Marketing & Strategy at Axel Security. Catch up on all presentations with our OnDemand feature.

I’m thrilled to have the chance to share with you my experience in a subject that I think is super important: the subtle art of winning through customer-centricity.

In this article, I’ll focus on:

• Customer centricity today.
• Why is customer-centricity the way forward?
• Zooming in on your customer journey.
• Writing the right story.
• Developing customer-centric feedback loops.
• Don’t skimp on segmentation.
• The brush strokes.

But first, a little bit about myself. I’ve been in product marketing for about 10 years. I’m currently at a cloud security company called Zscaler, where we help individuals connect to applications from anywhere in the world on any device using our cloud-delivered service. I have the great honor of being the Director and Solutions Marketing Lead for one of our key products.

Customer-centricity today

But enough about me and onto the subject at hand – customer-centricity. To give you a feel for the culture that’s driving most companies today, I thought it'd be interesting to start with some findings from PMA’s State of Product Marketing Report.