Strategy or customer engagement? Bangladeshi CEOs voice their preference
CEOs would prefer to engage more with their customers directly, instead of trying to formulate and execute their strategies from their offices
Recently, the CEO of a large global technology start-up decided to visualise his business from the perspective of one of his important groups of customers.
The company has been operational for more than a decade and is dominating the market worldwide. However, after leading the company for five years, the CEO realised the importance of understanding one specific group of customers better.
To achieve this, the CEO decided to register as a customer within that group. The goal was to gain valuable insights and verify the assumptions made when creating the company's business strategy.
Ever since the recognition of Business Strategy as a separate discipline of study and practice, business schools have commissioned research and teaching curricula on this. In addition, CEOs have started setting aside a good amount of time for strategic thinking and strategy formulation for their own companies.
Keep updated, follow The Business Standard's Google news channel
Over the years, the success of CEOs in running their businesses has increasingly been characterised by their ability to formulate and execute robust strategies.
The role of the customers remains central to a successful strategy formulation. While various factors contribute to a product's competitiveness, its acceptance among customers remains a crucial aspect for a business to be considered successful. A business cannot be deemed successful if it cannot cater to a majority of the target customers.
To understand the correlation better on how CEOs work on these two intertwined factors, the "Annual Global CEO Survey 2023" attempted to gather some inputs directly from the CEOs.
About 4,410 CEOs worldwide, including CEOs from Bangladesh, participated in this survey. One of the key questions to the CEOs was to understand how much time they spend today for the future of their businesses.
According to the global response, CEOs spend 22% of their time reshaping their business strategy and plans, and they want to increase it further to 26%. Furthermore, CEOs want to increase their time in engaging with customers from the present 17% to 19%.
Interestingly, Bangladesh CEOs indicated that they would like to reduce their time on strategy formulation from the present 24% to 19%. At the same time, they indicated that they wished to increase their time on customer engagement by 1.5x – from 16% to 24%.
Therefore, it can be safely assumed that Bangladesh CEOs would prefer to spend more time with their current and prospective customers.
The response from Bangladesh CEOs was revealing when the survey asked them to identify the impactful factors to their businesses.
A majority of the CEOs from Bangladesh have identified that the most impactful factor in their businesses is the changing customer demand and preferences. Therefore, it is expected that the CEOs would prefer to engage more with their customers directly, instead of trying to formulate and execute their strategies from their offices.
There is another myth to dispel in this context.
Over the last three decades, business strategy has been a much-discussed topic of teaching and practice in the classroom and executive offices. However, it is crucial to understand that strategy formulation and execution are not limited to the CEOs' purview alone.
Strategy formulation requires comprehensive data collection and many stakeholder interactions. Thus, robust business strategy formulation must include a robust customer engagement programme.
Bangladesh is one of the most resilient economies today and is recognised as one of the fastest-growing emerging markets. Therefore, understanding the changing behaviour of customers in this market will be helpful in reshaping business strategies of other comparable markets globally.
The writer is a partner with PwC.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.
