What Customers Really Value–and Why Leaders Keep Getting It Wrong
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I'm Alison Beard and this is the HBR IdeaCast. So ask any good business leader what their customers value and they will say they know. Right? It is their job to know. They have the data. They're checking in all the time on the front lines with their customers. And have years of experience in the industry. Right, and presumably good leaders also act on that information, they make a plan to better serve their customers. Absolutely, and yet
According to Vika Smithall, a professor of marketing at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University, companies often collect the data, but then build a plan instead that is based on their intuition. So they miss what matters most to their customers and they miss what to prioritize to create the most value for the company. So I do love intuition. But if organizations are collecting the data and the answer is in there, then they really should follow through on what they've learned. Yeah, I mean instead people are overriding what the data says pretty clearly, which of course leaves a lot of money on the table. So Mental spent seven years studying 72 businesses, and he has lots of advice on how companies can get better at understanding the data that they have at hand. He's the co-author of the HBR article, Do You Know What Your Customers Value? Here's our conversation.
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