Customer obsession goes beyond quantitative and qualitative data about customers, and it moves around customers’ feedback to gather valuable insights. Those insights start with the entrepreneur’s wandering process, driven by hunch, gut, intuition, curiosity, and a builder mindset. The product discovery moves around a building, reworking, experimenting, and iterating loop.
This sort of customer centrism was possible as the web, enabled information to flow freely.
So if in the previous era, information could be more easily controlled via top-down communication media (like TV), with the web, where billions of users each day generate content, it became harder and harder for companies to keep control over how customers interacted with each other.
Therefore, those companies that managed to obsess over customers also were, in part, the most successful throughout these times.
So, where in the previous decades, with frameworks like Porter’s Five Forces, the primary focus was on competition, in the last decade, the focus has been on customer experience:
Porter’s Five Forces is a model that helps organizations better understand their industries and competition. Professor Michael Porter published for the first time in his book “Competitive Strategy” in the 1980s. The model breaks down industries and markets by analyzing them through five forces
That doesn’t mean it will always be like that.
As we know, the business strategy world shifts and changes based on how the whole context around evolves.
For instance, as of now, with the rise of “Big Tech,” digitaldistribution pipelines have been controlled by a few large players, dominating many industries at once:
In this era, gaining traction initially might well start by looking for your microniche to dominate to develop your minimum viable audience:
The minimum viable audience (MVA) represents the smallest possible audience that can sustain your business as you get it started from a microniche (the smallest subset of a market). The main aspect of the MVA is to zoom into existing markets to find those people which needs are unmet by existing players.
Below is the list of books to understand the current business strategy landscape.
A blue ocean is a strategy where the boundaries of existing markets are redefined, and new uncontested markets are created. At its core, there is valueinnovation, for which uncontested markets are created, where competition is made irrelevant. And the cost-value trade-off is broken. Thus, companies following a blue ocean strategy offer much more value at a lower cost for the end customers.
The Innovator’s Dilemma
Crossing The Chasm
In his book, Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey A. Moore shows a model that dissects and represents the stages of adoption of high-tech products. The model goes through five stages based on the psychographic features of customers at each stage: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggard.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
