Strategic Marketing

By: Robert Simons

All companies claim that their strategies are customer driven. But the term “customer” is among the most elastic in management theory.

A working definition might be that your customers are the people or entities that buy your products and services and supply your revenue.

That includes any number of actors in a company’s value chain: consumers, wholesalers, retailers, purchasing departments, etc. Some companies go as far as to label internal units as customers: manufacturing is a customer of R&D, for instance, and both are customers of HR…

Many business leaders believe that treating all valuechain partners as customers improves internal coordination and responsiveness. In the following pages, I’ll present a customer-driven framework that has four steps: identifying the best primary customer for your business, creating processes to learn what that customer values, allocating resources accordingly, and building an interactive control process to monitor the assumptions underlying your choice.

Your most important customers are not those that generate the most revenue but those that can unlock the most value in your business.

For some businesses, the primary customer will be the end user or consumer of the product or service. For others, an intermediary — such as a reseller or a broker — will be the critical customer to which organisational resources should be devoted.

From “Choosing the Right Customer”