Thales Teixeira is my new favourite business thinker. His book, Decoupling the Customer Value Chain, challenges readers to think differently about how customers see and interpret value. He argues that it is the customer who disrupts a company, more than competitors and technologists.

For example, we used to visit electronics stores to buy a TV or a DVD player. Today, we are likely to visit the same store to see and touch the product, but buy it on Amazon at a lower price. In other words, the store accrues the cost of keeping and displaying stock without selling it. In this scenario, Amazon did not set out to disrupt electronics stores. On the contrary, it was the customer’s new behaviours, which emerged organically, that caused the disruption.

Teixeira encourages the reader to pay more attention to these changing behaviours than to so-called innovative technologies. Importantly, he does not disqualify the disruptive powers of some technologies, like A.I. However, some of the most disruptive companies, like Uber and Airbnb, did not invent any new technology per se. Their claim to fame was identifying and, in some cases, creating new customer behaviours.

When studying opportunities in relation to customer behaviour, Teixeira advises us to re-create the steps that a customer takes to acquire value. For example, to buy music we used to (1) discover it on radios, (2) drive to a store, (3) listen to the album at a booth in-store, (4) buy the album, (5) play it in the car or at home. Today, we (1) open an app, (2) play our favourite song, and (3) discover new music in the process. As you can see, the value chain is different.

Importantly, the latter value chain reduces the friction from desire to satisfaction. What took a few days now takes a few seconds. Our role as innovators, therefore, is not so much to create new technologies, but to think about and try to anticipate what the customer is trying to do, and reduce the friction as much as possible. In this case, friction could be understood in terms of time, money or effort.

I could go on and on about Thales Teixeira, but it is worth finding and studying his book, Decoupling the Customer Value Chain, which is both accessible and insightful.

I just finished listening to This is Marketing by Seth Godin for the second time, and I finally get it. When you choose your customer, you choose your future.

Case Study

In the world of trailwalking, there are people called angels. Somewhere deep in the mountains, where shops are too far, and water is scarce, you might meet someone dedicated to providing supplies. Sometimes they leave supplies on the trail, or in what they call honesty stores — an unmanned store where you can take anything you like, and leave the money. Then they replenish the store upon their return in a week or so.

Angels carve out time and make an effort to go to a remote place to serve adventurers on a journey — their journey — and help them in a small way. This is what it means to choose a customer. It is identifying someone on a journey, figuring out how to serve them, and then showing up generously for their sake.

Crucially, great customers pay you, not because it costs you time and effort to serve them, but because they want you to keep showing up for them and people like them. When you keep showing up, they tell their friends, which is how businesses grow. So, if you are looking for more customers, serve the ones you have because they likely belong to the same tribe as the ones you want.

This is marketing: Find the people you care about. Make a promise to show up in a meaningful way. Then, show up no matter what. Choose your customers. Choose your future.