How Market Planning Helps Firms Build Customer-Centric Capabilities and Why Startups Initiate Market Disruptions

Market planning is crucial in building customer-centric capabilities by putting the customer at the center of the plan design. Startups often initiate market disruptions by exploiting overlooked consumer segments and creating non-existing markets through innovations.

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1.how can market planning help a firm build customer-centric capabilities?
Customer-centric is an approach that is used by firms to solely focus on the customer changes
and preferences and ensures they meet the full experiences of their products and services.
Moreover, a firm’s market plan will play a crucial role in assisting the firm in building its
customer-centric capabilities, this means putting the customer entirely at the center of the market
plan design. This is beneficial in building these capabilities since the firm is able to study and
understand its current market efficiently. This means the firm will get to identify the various
risks and opportunities within the business environment and respond to it efficiently. this brings
into perspective a clear depiction of the problems facing the firm's customers and even creating a
market need which in turn leads to customer-centric capabilities.
It also allows a firm to partner with customers through gaining insights and feedback on their
various products, especially in the development stage. This puts the firm in a crucial position of
understanding the needs of the customers in relation to their products and services and tailor
them accordingly. This also leads to building a strong relationship between the customers and the
firm which results in customers loyalty as long as their needs, taste, and preference are met.
Market planning gives a firm an opportunity to focus on customer retention and loyalty to their
brand, products, and services. It’s often said in the business world the best customer is the one a
firm has, therefore it is effective to increase the lifetime value of these customers by achieving
more than their expectations, which is achieved through market planning

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2. why market disruptions is often initiated by startups but not the market leaders?
Market disruptions could be described as the process where startups that are mostly characterized
by limited resources are able to successfully challenge market leaders. These market leaders are
entirely focused on improving their products and services for their existing consumer segments
for the purpose of gaining customer loyalty, in the long run, ignoring the need of others. Startups
that successfully cause market disruptions by exploiting the overlooked and ignored consumer
segment acquiring a strong footing by providing alternative product and services that is mainly
characterized by lower prices with additional functionalities than the market leaders. Market
leaders will find it harder to respond to such scenario which is lowering the prices but it will
come at a high cost due to the cost of production giving startups a stronger footing as some
consumers will opt for their products. This motivates startups to move upmarket while still
challenging the market leaders through retaining the qualities and characteristics of their
products and services that initially drove their success in the market leading to mainstream
customers withdrawing their loyalty to the market-leading brands. Moreover, startups would
create non-existing markets through innovations by turning non-consumers into consumers
which would make existing markets where market leaders have dominated obsolete