The Secret Lives of Customers: A Detective Story about Solving the Mystery of Customer Behavior

A "detective story" that delivers key insights for any businessperson asking the questions: who really are our customers, why do we lose them, how do we regain them?

Customers can be a mystery. Despite the availability of more data than ever before, everyone, from the CEO to salespeople in the field, struggles to understand who their customers really are, what they want, why they lose them, and how to regain them.

To crack the case, start thinking like a market detective.

David Scott Duncan shows how in his entertaining story of Tazza, a fictional chain of cafes with declining sales and leaders urgently seeking to understand why. The vivid characters of Tazza's market detective force come to their aha moment when they finally understand why their most loyal customers walked out the door--and how they can get them back.

The core of the Tazza story is a simple, powerful idea that upends how most businesses view their customers. Customers have "jobs to be done." They "hire" companies to solve a problem or fulfill a need and "fire" them when unhappy. Duncan's fresh way of thinking about how to understand your customers' secret lives provides an innovative path for solving whatever market mysteries you face.

Author: David S. Duncan
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 05/04/2021
Pages: 224
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.50w x 1.00d
ISBN13: 9781541774490
ISBN10: 1541774493
BISAC Categories:
- Business & Economics | Decision Making & Problem Solving
- Business & Economics | Leadership
- Business & Economics | Marketing | Research

About the Author

David Scott Duncan is a managing director at Innosight, where he works with leaders to create customer-centric teams, strategies, and organizations. He is the coauthor of two previous books, including the Wall Street Journal bestseller Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice, written with the legendary Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. A leading authority on the theory and application of jobs to be done, Duncan has extensive experience conducting market investigations around the world. Prior to Innosight, he worked for four years as a consultant at McKinsey & Company and earned a PhD in physics from Harvard. He lives with his family in East Greenwich, RI.