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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.

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.

If you like Clayton Christensen's "jobs to be done" theory, then you will like this fictionalized account as it hones in on a specific example of a coffee place that sees a decline in its customers. The "jobs to be done" framework is used to create a map of jobs fulfilled by the coffee shop based on different customers needs and times. You could use this mapping framework to identify issues in a iterative and get to the bottom of whatever you need to change in your company.

The <I>The Secret Lives of Customers</I> is divided into two sections: a short "novel" illustrating the application of Clayton Christensen's Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) framework through a fictionalized case study about a coffee shop chain trying to expand its business, plus a brief coda summarizing the techniques illustrated by the story. David Duncan was a coauthor of Christensen's <I>Competing Against Luck</I>, which is the primary reference on JTBD theory, and he has actively worked in this space for a long time, so I expected a pragmatic guide to this topic.

For those who are new to JTBD theory, <I>The Secret Lives of Customers</I> is a very gentle introduction to the theory, as well as to the "light ethnography" needed to implement it. If you've read <I>Competing Against Luck</I>, or if you've ever worked closely with Innosight, IDEO, Continuum, or any of the dozens of design firms that use these techniques, you won't find much new here, although the book's coda more or less stands on its own as a refresher.

Having read the original source, and having participated in many dozens of hours of customer interviews over the years, I didn't personally get much out of <I>The Secret Lives of Customers</I>, but I hesitate to send readers who are new to this area straight to <I>Competing Against Luck</I>. I think JTBD theory needs a book somewhere between these two--one that fleshes out a half-dozen case studies with description of how the insights were uncovered from customer interviews, ideally with somewhat less corny dialog than is found here. In the coda, Duncan lists six intriguing bullet points from his career--expanding on those might be the book that's needed in this space.

I thought this book would be useful, especially since many of us small business owners have taken a financial hit in the days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Competition can get stiff when there are less customers and clients shopping for services than there were a year ago. Growth may slow and even backslide for some entrepreneurs. The book starts out conversational and provocative from page one and invites us to take a look at why customers are driven to choose as they do. It’s a quick light read with several practical tips to help business owners continue to orient themselves toward customers’ evolving desires and demands.