The Hidden Risk in Customer Feedback

Reading Time: 6 mins

Customer feedback can be a wealth of insights or a dangerous trap.

The trap happens when you treat every piece of feedback equally. It throws you nto a boardroom where you're paralyzed by contradictory data. Your professional customers want one thing. But your hobbyist customers want another. Your family buyers ask for a feature. But it's one you know your young single users would hate.

And it can send you into a state of strategic whiplash..

This paralysis stems from hearing many different customer types at once. It leaves you without a clear direction. You end up moving toward the average of what all customers say, not what the right customers say.

Clarity doesn't come from more feedback. It comes from having the focus to listen to the right customer for a specificbusiness goal.

To get the right answer, you must first ask the right question.

The Solution: Align the Customer to the Goal

Before you analyze another feedback report, you must define the outcome you want to achieve.

The right customers are simply those who are relevant to helping you reach that outcome.

There is no single group of right customers. Only the right customers for an outcome.

The outcome must come before the customer data. It acts as a filter for relevance.

Goal 1: Acquire a New, High-Value Segment

Right Customers: The Customer You Want, Not the One You Have

By 1990, Black & Decker's (B&D) brand was a liability.

It meant "consumer" and "DIY" tools. Because of this, its market share with professionals fell to only 9%. Meanwhile, Makita had a strong 50% dominance.

The problem was a strange puzzle.

B&D's pro-grade tools were rated by one research study as the "highest quality in the industry." But pros still refused to buy them. The B&D name, sold in mass-market retail, had a bad reputation that felt incongruent with a professional's identity.

No professional wanted their customers to see them using hobbyist tools.

Listening to their average customer (the hobbyist) would have been a fatal mistake. To win, B&D's leaders needed to stop listening to their current customers. They had to focus on the ones who ignored them: professional tradesmen.

The problem was never the tool's quality; it was brand permission.

To solve the problem, B&D reintroduced a professional brand it had purchased in 1960: DeWalt. And they got it into professionals' hands through a grassroots campaign.

The very first 1992 DeWalt tools were relabeled models of B&D tools from its existing "Kodiak" and "Professional" lines. Nothing was different on the inside from existing B&D models that professionals shunned.

The durability, quality, and extended warranty made them loved by contractors.

This focus on the right customer—with the right brand name and sold in the right stores—is what solved the 9% market share problem. It led to significant market share growth for B&D and the DeWalt brand.

Goal 2: Survive a Competitive War

Right Customer: The Purchaser and the User

By 2009, Old Spice was a dying brand.

It was a relic, widely viewed as an outdated brand for old men, with a U.S. market share of only 3%.

P&G and its agency Widen+Kennedy identified one key statistic: women purchased 60% of male body wash. The users weren't the purchasers.

It was a key moment, but the future still didn't look bright. The brand was about to be squeezed in a dual-front competitive war:

1. Axe owned the young male user.

2. Dove Men+Care was launching a massive Super Bowl campaign to target the same female purchaser that P&G had identified.

As a struggling brand, they didn't want to compete head-to-head with either customer group. So, they took a different approach and targeted both the purchaser and the user in a single conversation.

As Wieden+Kennedy said, the central question became, "How can we get couples to want to have a conversation about body wash?" And the solution was to use humor as a Trojan Horse.

The "Hello, ladies" campaign was a funny twist on romance fantasies aimed at women. Its wild moments, such as "I'm on a horse," let men join in the fun. This created a new space that was distinct from Axe (Juvenile) and Dove (Serious/Nurturing).

And they launched it three days before the Super Bowl, to get ahead of Dove's new direction.

It eclipsed the Dove launch and drove a 125% year-over-year increase in sales.

Goal 3: Defend Your Brand AND Expand Your Audience

Right Customers: A Split Strategy

In 2008, Starbucks faced a perfect storm..

The latte had gone from a luxury indulgence to, as founder Howard Schultz put it, "a poster child for excess." And McDonalds' waged a price war with ads claiming "four bucks is dumb."

Internally, the company was suffering from brand dilution as a result of its aggressive growth.

With profits in free fall, Howard Schultz returned to a company in a "desperate" state.

Listening only to the "average customer" (demanding $1 coffee) would have been a death sentence. But relying solely on the core loyalists wouldn’t have been a smart strategy during the 2008 financial crisis.

Schultz’s brilliant insight was not to choose. Instead, he addressed customers in two phases.

Phase 1: The "Soul" Strategy (For the Core Customer): His first move was to fix the brand dilution problem. Because without being able to defend their quality, they couldn't charge for it.

In February 2008, he closed all 7,100 U.S. stores for "Espresso Excellence Training." It was a $6 million loss in revenue to signal to the core customers that Starbucks was serious about quality returning.

Phase 2: The "Survival" Strategy (For the Price-Sensitive): After recommitting to quality, his second move was to fight the price war.

In early 2009, he introduced "$3.95 'breakfast pairings'" and "$1 bottomless cups of coffee." It helped Starbucks target price-conscious customers with certain items. At the same time, it kept prices higher on others. This way, Starbucks avoided being easily replaced by fast food competitors.

He listened to both customers. But he aligned their feedback to two different, parallel strategies, not one average one.

Goal 4: Expand Your Market by Evolving Your Focus

Right Customer: The Aspirational Customer (The Halo Effect)

The right customer is not static. It must evolve as your business goals change.

And that's what B&D did with DeWalt after winning over the professional customers.

After "Act 1" (winning the pro), their new goal was to capture the entire market. They did this by leveraging the "pro-grade" badge they had built.

The aspirational hobbyist didn't have the same needs as the heavy pro users. The issue for this customer wasn’t about the reliability of the power tools during heavy use, like the pros. Instead, they wanted to feel capable and professional.

B&D's leadership created a powerful halo effect that flowed down from the professional to the hobbyist. The amateur's logic became simple: if the tool was good enough for a pro to abuse daily, it was more than good enough for them.

This move reversed B&D's original race-to-the-bottom problem.

It allowed them to capture the "average" customer as a premium, aspirational brand. A feat they could never have achieved under the B&D name.

Your Diagnostic Toolkit: Finding the Right Customer

Your strategic paralysis will end the moment you stop averaging your feedback. Use these four questions to find your focus.

1. What is the single biggest business goal we must achieve in the next 12 months?Be specific: Is it acquiring a new high-value segment, like DeWalt in Act 1? Surviving a competitive threat, like Old Spice? Or do you need a split strategy, like Starbucks?

2. To achieve that one goal, which customer segment feedback matters? If your goal is frequency, you must talk to existing, semi-frequent customers—not new prospects. If it's acquisition, you must talk to non-customers who prefer a competitor.

3. What feedback is irrelevant or distracting from this core objective? This is the most important question. Who are you listening to right now that is sending you on a wild goose chase? Who is diverting you away from the goal?

4. Is our "right customer" from five years ago still the right customer for our goals today? This is the DeWalt "Act 2" question. If your goal has evolved, your customer focus may also need to.

Clarity in strategy doesn't come from having more data. It comes from knowing which data to pay attention to. And which to ignore.

Your brand cannot be the preferred choice for everyone, but it must be the preferred choice for the right ones. And that depends on your current goals.

Stop averaging your feedback and start aligning it.

Onward,

Aaron Shields

P.S. That fourth diagnostic question is the one I see most established leaders get stuck on: Is your "right customer" from five years ago still the "right customer" for your goals today?

This is the "DeWalt Act 2" problem. If your goals have evolved but your customer focus hasn't, you're stuck. If you'd like a free 15-minute sparring session to navigate this exact transition, just reply to this email and I’ll set up a time.