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Key Takeaways Customer surveys can reveal what people say, but deeper qualitative research is needed to understand what actually drives their behavior.
Companies shouldn’t freeze out of fear; they should learn what customers fear losing and bring them along through meaningful change.
Cracker Barrel’s Julie Masino didn’t step down for making changes. Masino stepped down, in effect, because of how she found out what to change.
Masino came in, modernized a beloved brand, customers revolted, President Trump weighed in, she reversed course, and now she’s gone anyway even after steering a real turnaround. The moral is simple: don’t touch what customers love. Change is dangerous. Keep the status quo.
That moral is wrong, and it’s about to cost many companies a lot of money.
I’ve spent two decades watching executives use “we did the research” as a substitute for actually understanding their customers. Masino pointed to customer research when she rolled out the new look, and the backlash happened anyway. But the takeaway of “change bad, nostalgia good” misses the actual failure. The failure wasn’t the decision to evolve a stale brand, but mistaking data for understanding.
Those are not the same thing. I wrote an entire book on the difference, because I kept watching smart leaders get burned by it.
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