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wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the HBO Ideacast. I'm Sarah Green. I'm talking today with Robert Simon, Harvard

Business School Professor, an author of the recent HBO article, Choosing the

right customer, the first step in a winning strategy. Bob thanks much for talking with us today.

It's my pleasure.

So I have to ask you, you start the article by discussing several different definitions

of what a customer could be, which a little bit surprised me. I mean why

go to that trouble today to define what a customer is, don't we know?

Well it turns out I think we do not. Well maybe the other way to think of it is we too often describe

almost everyone as a customer and this has come through very much with my work with

companies and at Harvard Education Programs that we've fallen into what can be seen as on one hand a very

inclusive habit of calling every constituent of the firm a customer and sometimes

even well I shouldn't say sometimes I would say most companies actually use the word

customer internally so that the manufacturing is a department of R&D and the HR

department has customers all throughout the business but I I've discovered that very skilled managers who are sensitive

to the competitive effects of that typically will not allow it. So part of the reason for writing

this article was to alert people of the importance of having clarity

as to who the primary customer was, really that one individual or group that unlocks value

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