David S. Duncan

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The Secret Lives of Customers: A Detective Story About Solving the Mystery of Customer Behavior by David S Duncan is a business book with a unique way of thinking about tailoring your business to its customers and not the other way around. Mr. Duncan is a senior partner, executive, and advisor on strategy and growth.

This is a short book which follows around a “detective” hired to find out why a business is losing customers. The author shows how his ideas can be implemented through an alter-ego consultant hired by a small chain of cafes. Tazza has been losing customers and don’t know why, but they’re going to find out.

It was interesting that one of the lessons is that people want to feel as being a part of a community. After all, COVID this has been more prominent than before. From some reason I’ve been seeing this front and center and many articles.

Above all, through its story, shows the reader how to ask the right questions. Accordingly, one needs get the answers, and sometimes they’re not necessarily the ones you want. The author created several characters (consultant, data mining genius, owner, new executive, etc.) to illustrate multiple angles of an issue. The different roles also play into the discussion, with questions that might arise from the findings as pertaining to their own agenda.

The Secret Lives of Customers: A Detective Story About Solving the Mystery of Customer Behavior by David S Duncan finishes with the author reiterating, clarifying, and explain his method to elicit answers, and more importantly, figure out what the problem is in the first place.

The book was a lot more entertaining than I thought it would be. The parable of Tazza’s issues worked very well to bring across the author’s ideas and system. There is even a “Market Detective” website – https://marketdetective.com/.

I learned several things from this book, most importantly it reminded me to keep an open mind, as well as to try and think differently. Another key point, as in almost all industries, finding the root cause of the problem is the most difficult part,. Afterwards, the solution usually presents itself afterwards.

Extra bonus points for the Sherlock Holmes quotations throughout.… (más)