Into the Customers’ Shoes: Multimodal practices for customer-centric strategizing

This study explores customer-centric strategizing at a digital bank utilizing a 34-month visual ethnography. We adopt a multimodal perspective to reveal three practices that presentify and thus ‘bring’ the customer into strategizing – inquiring, perspective-taking and appreciating. These practices enable strategists to understand customer contexts, empathize with their experiences and value their strategizing contributions over time. Our findings advance research on strategy-as-practice and highlight the role of external stakeholders in the strategy process. Specifically, we demonstrate how multimodal practices shape strategy by enabling managers to presentify customers through empathetic competence. By doing so, we illuminate the diverse skills needed to effectively orchestrate multimodal resources in a way that empathetically connects with customers and informs strategizing.