Book Review: The Secret Lives of Customers: A Detective Story About Solving the Mystery of Customer Behavior by David S Duncan

About:

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.

  • 224 pages
  • Publisher : PublicAffairs
  • Language : English
  • ISBN-10 : 1541774493


My rat­ing for The Secret Lives of Customers4
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Thoughts:

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.

Buy The Secret Lives of Customers from Amazon.com*
More Books by David S Duncan*

Zohar — Man of la Book
Dis­claimer: I got got this book for free.
*Ama­zon links point to an affiliate accout

Summary
Review Date
Reviewed Item
The Secret Lives of Customers: A Detective Story About Solving the Mystery of Customer Behavior by David S Duncan
Author Rating
4
Product Name
The Secret Lives of Customers: A Detective Story About Solving the Mystery of Customer Behavior by David S Duncan
Man of la Book

A father, husband, avid reader, blogger, software engineer & wood worker who is known the world over as a man of many interests and to his wife as “an idiot”.

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