

That is a recipe for obsolescence in today’s economy. Yet many companies still spend the bulk of their research budget on traditional techniques (e.g., focus groups, interviews, and surveys), or treat insights as an afterthought, which leaves them with a limited and often incorrect view of what customers want. “Number of Netflix streaming subscribers worldwide from 3rd quarter 2011 to 2nd quarter 2016 (in millions),” .ĭeveloping a better understanding of customers is increasingly a strategic necessity, because fast-moving markets, new technologies, and new business models are changing what customers want and how they shop. and Netflix saw its subscribers triple between 20, largely because of its ability to develop hit shows such as House of Cards, based on advanced analysis of subscribers’ past viewing behavior. Charles Gaudet, “What Amazon can teach you about cross-selling,”. Thanks to its data-driven recommendation engine, Amazon attributes more than one third of its revenue to cross-selling, 1 1. Philips has achieved major market-share gains in highly contested home-appliance categories through city-level growth analysis. Unilever, for example, has successfully engaged in consumer cocreation to launch TRESemmé, a fast-growing dry-shampoo brand that is now one of the best-selling mass hair-care products in the US.

Core to this consumer focus is a strong belief in insights, and in the active use of a diverse mix of insight tools-new and old, qualitative and quantitative, digital and analog-to get better answers. What they have in common, though, is that they drive growth by meeting consumer needs better than their competitors do.

They compete in very different industries, and while Unilever and Philips are firmly rooted in the 19th century, Amazon and Netflix are unthinkable without the Internet. What do Unilever, Philips, Amazon, and Netflix have in common? At first sight, nothing much.
