A Seven-Year Study of 72 Companies Finds Leaders Often Misidentify What Their Customers Value

Four professors write in Harvard Business Review that companies often misidentify the drivers of customer value, even after heavy spending on feedback and competitor tracking, and shift priorities so often that customers are confused.

What the article says

Vikas Mittal and Alessandro Piazza of Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business, Sonam Singh of the University of South Florida and Ashwin Malshe of the University of Texas at San Antonio draw on a seven-year study of 72 companies and further research with thousands of customers and firms. Companies spend heavily on customer feedback, competitor monitoring and market analysis, they write, yet often misidentify what drives customer value; strategy rests on intuition, recent events or competitors’ moves. Leaders change priorities often, which creates clutter, confuses customers and wastes resources. Their approach: use data and statistical models to find which value drivers most affect sales and profitability, focus employees on a small number of priorities, and cut low-value activities. The article is paywalled; its public summary does not name the industries studied.

Why it matters at the top of the house

In many industrial companies the list of what customers value is written from the last lost order or the loudest account. The authors’ test is narrower: a value driver earns its place only if it moves sales or profit, and the list stays short enough for every employee to act on.

One move to copy

The practice the research ties to better returns: test each supposed customer value driver against sales and profitability with the company’s own data, then focus employees on the few that move them and stop the activities that do not.

Source: Harvard Business Review, “Do You Know What Your Customers Value?,” by Vikas Mittal, Alessandro Piazza, Sonam Singh and Ashwin Malshe, November–December 2026 issue (published November 1, 2026). The Marketing Table shares the link and a note on why it matters; the article and its copyright belong to the publisher.

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