By Ron Langford and Kraig Schulz
Strategy & Leadership, March '06
(excerpt)

This article introduces a more comprehensive approach to generating customer insights that can improve almost any organization’s ability to drive profitable, customer-focused growth. The approach, which we call ‘‘3-D customer insight,’’ provides fact-based answers to the following critical questions:

• What customers and customer segments should we focus on?
• What new products should we launch, and to which customers and customer segments should they be introduced?
• How can we most profitably differentiate our offer from those of competitors?
• Where and how can we get the biggest bang from our growth investments (e.g. marketing initiatives)?

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