Aneel Lakhani

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Aneel Lakhani
Research Director
1 year at Gartner
14 years IT industry

Aneel Lakhani is a director at Gartner Research. His primary area of research focus is the adoption and operation of virtualization and cloud computing in the enterprise ...Read Full Bio

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customer as enemy

by Aneel Lakhani  |  May 31, 2012  |  5 Comments

I saw this question come through on my Facebook feed. The context is large, public technology companies.

Why, so often, are customers seen as the enemy?

Because they’re the thing in between the company and the revenue. Because the real customer is shareholders and the buying-customer is part of the supply chain. Because product managers think customers exist to buy their products. Because better competition is seen as a decision failure on the customer’s part instead of a portfolio/marketing/competitive failure on the company’s part. Because large entrenched public companies are often myopically, maladaptively egocentric.

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Category: business     Tags:

5 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Peter Varhol   May 31, 2012 at 8:54 pm

    The real customer is often internal, not external. Product management, marketing, and sales learn to please internal constituents rather than actual buying customers.

    I was a consultant for one large integrate tech manufacturer in the early 1990s (I won’t use the name, but the initials were Digital Equipment Corporation), and I sat in meetings for hours where the sole focus was how to satisfy other groups within the company. The actual customer was almost never mentioned.

  • 2 Are Customers the Enemy? | Station Master's blog   June 7, 2012 at 1:24 pm

    [...] was struck by the title of a recent blog post “Customer as Enemy“ by Gartner Research Director Aneel Lakhani. It’s a short post so I have included it [...]

  • 3 Public Parts: Rules for the Radically Public Company - Sally Duros   June 9, 2012 at 12:47 am

    [...] customer as enemy(blogs.gartner.com) Be Sociable, Share! Tweet [...]

  • 4 Gartner explains why customers are often seen as the enemy | Customer Oriented Development & Management   December 14, 2012 at 12:58 pm

    [...] just found a recent blog post “Customer as Enemy“ by Gartner Research Director Aneel Lakhani. It’s just a short post but it cleary shows the problem a lot of companies are [...]

  • 5 Are Customers the Enemy? - Enterprise Tech Central   December 24, 2012 at 9:13 am

    [...] was struck by the title of a recent blog post “Customer as Enemy“ by Gartner Research Director Aneel Lakhani. It’s a short post so I have included it [...]

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