This is the last of the fables/parables on strategy I’ve been doing lately.

There once was a certain company started to worry a about its core customers.  They weren’t buying as much as they used to. The number of core customers wasn’t growing like it had.  The product wasn’t selling quite as strong as before and the stock price was stagnant.

They got together in the board. They looked at charts. The presenter said, here’s our core customers. There’s a few less of them than they used to be. But we have all these marginal customers. There’s lots of them. What if we could appeal more to the marginal customers?.  They did a poll and a focus group and even a pilot program.  The poll and the focus group both said, yeah sounds great.   They did a pilot program—wow, the select group of marginal customers they focused on really responded with all the personal attention from HQ researchers, they picked up their buying a lot, almost to the point of being core customers.

A year later, they had another meeting.  They looked at charts again.  Their core customer base declined a lot more. Apparently, they were unhappy with the new approach. But now there were even more marginal customers.

Wow, they thought look at all those marginal customers. The strategy of ignoring the core and appealing to the margins is now more important than ever. So they doubled down.

Moral: results are the most important numbers.

Thoughts: I got one thing from reading Spengler.  It’s not something anyone else has got, I’m not even sure its in there.  But what I got is that there are two different ways of defining things.

The standard western way is a comprehensive definition.  You try to go right up to the edges of a concept and mark out what’s in and what’s out.  A customer is “anyone who has ever intentionally bought our product,” something like that.

The other way is just to define the core.  Everything else is partial, based on how much it deviates from the core.  A customer is “someone who buys our products weekly,”something like that.

They both have their strengths and weaknesses.  One advantage of the core definition approach is you don’t get distracted on the peripheries.

The core definition of a family allows you to not get hung up trying to decide if a single man who adopts his druggie sister’s kid is a family while a gay couple isn’t.  They both have family like characteristics in some ways, and not in others