Every organization has what I call a strategic customer. It’s the target market that, if lost, creates peril for the business. For an advertising agency, it’s the businesses that consider the agency their agency-of-record, as these customers cover fixed costs. Many companies, like Amazon, have dual-sided business models: it has two customer groups, buyers of products from its platform and suppliers of those products. Is one more strategic? At Amazon’s start, providers of products and services ranked higher. Why? If publishers and authors had refused to sell their books through Amazon, we’d still enjoy visiting Borders stores. Over time, as Amazon became a required channel for most manufacturers, the company wisely changed its strategic customer to the consumer. Local stores, Prime, same-day delivery, Alexa, and other solutions to better serve us are proof points of the strategic shift. Facebook, like Amazon, has a…
