When the KING orders a dosa in a restaurant he expects sambar and coconut chattni to come along with it. But it did not start this way. Once the poor restaurant owner wanted to please the KING and provided him with sambar and coconut chattni, the KING appreciated it very much. As days went by the KING was expecting sambar and chattni to come along with his dosa without asking and slowly it became a MUST WANT for him. Now, if the restaurant owner stops giving what he initially thought was an offer, he will be thrown out of business by the KING. Now who is in mistake, the restaurant owner or the KING? Millions and Millions of dollars are wasted every year on customer rejects. It is simply because of not understanding this crazy KING properly.

Today there are many customer-preference rating tools that are used to understand what the KING really want. The KING himself have a hard time articulating what exactly he want. If you list the product specifications on a scale of 1 to 10 and ask the KING to list his priority of 1 being least priority and 10 being high priority he will become confused. Because the KING being the KING wants everything and everything is priority for him. The simple example is when a hotel waiter asks the KING what he likes to eat, the usual reply by the KING would be, "What do you have" or "show me the menu" because the KING do not know what he really want. After much thinking he will say, "can I have some water first" Many of the tier 1, 2 and 3 suppliers in today's business world are becoming a failure only because they have a hard time understanding their KING's need.

Some corporates are now begining to use an upcoming technique that is proving to be successful called "Maximum Difference Scaling" or "MaxDiff". This technique was pioneered in the early 1990's by Jordan Louviere, who is now a professor at the University of Technology, Sydney. With most cutting-edge academic developments, it took time to translate Louviere's research into practical tools. MaxDif requires customers to make a sequence of explicit trade-offs. Researchers begin by amassing a list of product or brand attributes - typically from 10 to 40 that represent potential benefits. Then they present respondents with sets of four or so attributes at a time, asking them to select which attribute of each set they prefer most and least. Subsequent rounds of mixed goupings enable the researchers to identify the standing of each attributes relative to all the others by the number of times customers select it as their most or least important consideration.

MaxDiff theory helps to predict how customers will behave and can be extremely powerful. Companies are starting to apply MaxDiff analysis to understand their customer (KING) better.

Google as: MaxDiff

All the best

Joy Leo