Who is Your Customer, and What Do They Want?
Posted: September 1, 2009
Author: Trent Kaufman
In the late 1990s Levi-Strauss failed to anticipate new consumer tastes in jeans, and subsequently lost $6 billion in market value. Meanwhile VF Corp., maker of Wranglers and Lee Jeans, worked with customers to introduce new styles that increased VF’s market share.
Companies need to approach production and marketing decisions with an understanding of customer needs. This paper explores the relationship between success and effective customer research.
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Author
Trent Kaufman
Dr. Trent Kaufman is the Chief Executive Officer of Cicero Group. In 2006, he sold to Cicero the education transformation firm he had founded five years earlier. Today, that company, Education Direction (www.eddirection.com) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Cicero’s and works with over a thousand schools around the world to measurably improve student learning.
Dr. Kaufman is respected globally for developing sophisticated systems to enable the use of performance data to maximize individual and team performance at organizations of varied purpose and form. He is a leading author of two best-selling books surrounding organizational transformation.
Prior to becoming a leading thinker in organizational design and transformation, Dr. Kaufman’s first “career” was in public education. He began as a social studies teacher in Washington D.C. before becoming a high school principal in the Bay Area of California.
Trent received a bachelor’s degree in Social Science, with an emphasis in Economics from Brigham Young University. He earned a master’s degree in Education and Leadership from the University of California, Berkeley. Trent earned a master’s degree in Policy Management and a doctorate in Performance Management from Harvard University.
