The Financial Times Guide to Strategy: How to Create and Deliver a Winning Strategy, Third Edition

Chapter 7. What do the customers think?

I told Randy that I would show him the result of my customer interviews. Characteristically, 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, and an enforced vacation for Randy Mayhew. But I suppose we might as well see the interview results,’ he said.

If I had chosen to show Randy the average results of all the interviews, he would not have been too wrong. But I knew better than that. I showed him the results by segment, using a simple but very effective technique called ...