Owl Have You Know

Finding and Perfecting Your Customer-Focused Strategy feat. Professor Vikas Mittal

Published: 18 March 2026 at 09:00 Europe/London

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Episode notes

Most companies think they're customer-focused. Most are wrong.

Vikas Mittal, the J. Hugh Liedtke Professor of Marketing at Rice Business, has spent his career helping CEOs, MBA students and others learn the difference between truly serving customers and simply appeasing them.

In this episode, Vikas joins host Brian Jackson ’21 to explain why so many corporate strategies fail: the buzzwords, shiny-object initiatives, and mission-statement retreats that produce 50 priorities and zero focus. He shows what it looks like when organizations commit to the one or two things that genuinely create customer value — and stay the course.

He also shares how this approach comes to life through his Executive Education course, Strategic Growth Through Customer Focus, and the Rice Business Center for Customer-Based Execution and Strategy, which produced a landmark report – interviewing over 3,000 customers to reveal what actually drives value across industries and what doesn't.

Plus: his famous sneaker collection and why he wants everyone writing with fountain pens.

The Owl Have You Know Podcast is a production of Rice Business and is produced by University FM.

Episode Quotes:

Strategy is an ultimate dark art

26:10: Strategy is the way it is done in companies. And I repeat this all the time, it's the ultimate dark art. Nobody knows why we are doing it, but everybody believes we have to do it just because my predecessor told me this is how we should do it. And you ask the predecessor, why are you doing it? Well, my predecessor told me this is how we do it. Right? And it's the ultimate dark art and people just keep doing it.

Defining customer focus

11:36: Customer focus means using science to figure out what creates value for customers, which is very different than just asking the customer what would you want? And believing that whatever the customer tells you is right and just doing it.

When academic research calls the CEO

01:40: Surprisingly, a lot of the work I ended up doing with CEOs and companies came from CEOs at different companies reading my research, published in academic journals, you know, which is completely the opposite of what a lot of people think, that if you publish in academic journals, people don't read it. I was blown away, how many times I got contacted by companies say, we've got such and such paper of yours, can you come and help us?

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