Simply Strategy: The shortest route to the best strategy

Chapter 7. What Do the Customers Think?

Customers are obviously at the heart of your business and the fact that they keep coming back for more means you are doing a few things right. Now is the time to find out what that is, and, occasionally, also what you are less good at. We do so by asking them.

While we were at lunch, I told Jack that afterwards I would show him the result of my customer interviews. Underlining his growing uneasiness about his business, he volunteered to guess what the results would be.

‘They’ll all say that we are lousy on price and pretty good on everything else. So the only way we could improve our market share is to buy it, to cut into our profits. As you know, lower prices would mean lower profits, a lower share price ...