Third Eye

How can you turn customer insights into growth?

- Julie Williamson

Stop for a minute and ask yourself: Do you know what your customers really want from you?

History is rich with examples of companies who answered ‘yes’ to that question, but failed anyway. Among the more famous are Kodak, Sony, and Blockbuster, though you can easily add to that list. All three companies had teams of people working to provide them with massive data on what their customers wanted.

But they failed to convert their customer insights into growth. They missed significant changes in their customer base, and failed to convert on clear opportunities to grow in their markets. All three held dominant market positions, and had a clear line of sight into large groups of loyal customers. So what happened?

Let us start by considering what goes wrong with customer insights. There are four significant mistakes many companies make that create the scenarios we see in the worst kinds of case studies. Your organisation may have some of these challenges as well.

• Relying on isolated ‘customer insight’ teams for strategies: Kodak had plenty of customer insights—they paid good money for internal and external perspectives. The problem? The brand and customer satisfaction statistics did not dip as digital photography came on strong. People still loved Kodak for print photography, they just went elsewhere for digital solutions. Customer insight teams were focused on the wrong questions, and did not recognise the coming disruption.

• Spotting an important trend and responding from only one part of the business: Sony had budgets for customer insights, spread across about seven key lines of business. But these individual areas did not coordinate. As a result, they did not put the pieces together to create a comprehensive digital music strategy. The insights were there, but the perspective was too siloed to position Sony to step into the digital music space before Apple dominated the market.