Customer-led growth: an impossibility or the way to lasting success?

This article explores the concept of customer-led growth, a mantra and cliché for marketers, and a goal that is much more difficult to achieve than is typically supposed.

Customer-led growth: an impossibility or the way to lasting success?

Charlie Dawson and Simon CaulkinThe Foundation

Marketing's reason for being is to promote consumer-led growth. It is a mantra and a cliché, and much that is written on the subject leads us to believe it is an obvious and achievable goal. But as Charlie Dawson and Simon Caulkin argue, lasting customer-led growth is unnatural to an organisation and very much more difficult to achieve than is typically supposed.

Why does anyone start an organisation – a business, a political party, a charity? They might want...

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