What Customers Really Value—and Why Leaders Keep Getting It Wrong

Good leaders believe they understand customer priorities. They invest heavily in data, direct conversations, and really knowing their industry. But according to Vikas Mittal, a professor of marketing at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University, leaders are missing a key step. Without a science-driven strategy, businesses don’t understand what matters most to their customers or what to prioritize to create the most value for the company. Mittal spent seven years studying 72 businesses, and he has lots of advice on how companies can get better at understanding the data that they have at hand. Plus, how to win over leaders who rely too heavily on intuition when the most impactful answers lie in the science. Mittal is the author of the article, “Do You Know What Your Customers Value?”