As a practitioner and academic, I spend a lot of time with clients and students talking about the fundamental need to listen to your customers and act upon what they’re telling you. It is basic common sense and basic best practice – how many times has a customer said about a producer that they just don’t listen and they certainly don’t understand?

I try and keep up with contemporary writing on the subject of strategy and customer. I have recently picked up on some interesting themes about over attention to both our best customers and closest competitors.

It’s all down to the three “traps”:

1 The Customer Trap

Over reliance on listening to our best customers assumes they have the right answers and perspectives. The counter intuitive customer trap is that our best customers are naturally comfortable with us and happy to tell us that we’re doing a great job. The issue is that over reliance on our best customers might make us ignore those in the market who aren’t our customers, who buy alternative products and services. It might be that they could tell us far more about what we might be providing than our customers. And we all know that loyal customers only need to see something new that we don’t provide to become rapidly disloyal!

2 The Supplier Knows Best Trap

As businesses/products/services become more established there is a psychological danger in that we start to think about what our customers want based on our own perceptions. This is often a result of great pride in what we do and a belief that we are absolutely customer aligned. But it just doesn’t always work like this. How often do we write off a new competitive product or service as “sub-standard” or “poor quality” and certainly of little benefit to our customers? What we really mean is that we don’t think it’s good enough for our customers but perhaps our customers will think otherwise.

3 The Competitor Trap

You should not only be concerned with the customer trap. There’s also what Nigel Piercy refers to as the competitive box or competitor trap. Research shows that we can also seek comfort in our “best” competitors – usually no more than three or four who “play the game” according to all our rules. Providing we keep them firmly in our sight and make sure that they don’t jump out of that competitive box then everything will at least be manageable.

The danger with the three traps is that we can run the risk of being satisfied with doing better (incrementalism) rather than doing different (innovation).

Let’s look at what history has taught us. There was Nokia, the leader in mobile phones. Nokia’s loyal customers loved their phones. What else could a loyal Nokia 630i user possibly want? Think about Blockbuster, the video rental company which incrementally diversified into DVDs and Ben & Jerrys! Loyal customers liked the choice and savings over purchase. And then there were traditional airlines, taxis, supermarkets, banks, in fact traditional everything! All victims of the three traps. All out-innovated and out-performed. Welcome to Netflix, Ryanair, Apple, Uber, Aldi… the list just goes on.

Would our loyal customers have shown us this future? Highly doubtful.

So how do we get around to understanding what our customers don’t want or need but might very much want and need going forward?

• If you believe in research then make sure you also research people who never became your customers. Especially in B 2 B, you’ll have probably already had some meaningful engagement.
• Take a long hard look at your competitors – but not just the obvious ones. Re-evaluate what constitutes a competitor and learn from disruptive and innovative companies in other sectors.
• Absorb what is going on around you. Take the time to read the papers, watch television, Google some recent research. There are so many ideas and trends coming around that we need to be open to absorb them rather than get caught by them.
• And that takes us to the last trap – The Being Caught Out Trap – don’t let it happen to you.