Using the Johari Window for your customer strategy

The Johari Window is a psychological tool that is used to help people understand their own interpersonal communication and relation with others.

A typical Johari Window exercise would ask the subject to describe their personality and the same for peers of the subject.

The result of the exercise is mapped into 4 areas:

	Known to self	Not know to self
Known to others	Arena	Blind spot
Not known to others	Facade	Unknown

The Johari Window can also be used for giving people feedback during their yearly/quarterly performance review talks or even just after an activity they have participated in.

But we can also use the Johari Window for creating our customer strategy.

Collect customer feedback

The customer feedback can be collected in different ways: surveys, interviews, release evaluations etc.

This feedback can be mapped to the different areas of the Johari Window. Use the feedback for working improving your Arena area and use the feedback to discover your Blind Spot area. Internal assessments of customer interaction can be placed in the Facade Area.

Create customer vision

Since the vision, mission and strategy of an organization should be attuned to the customer, the customer feedback can be used to check if we are doing the right things.

This vision can be used to create a Dream Johari Window. The Dream Johari Window is the projection of what you want to be and how you want to be perceived. It is not the actual situation, but it is suited for setting your targets, your ideal picture.

When used in this context, the Dream Johari Window can be compared with a vision statement: “we see ourselves at…”, “we try to be…”, “we want to accomplish…”, …

An example from PepsiCo:

PepsiCo’s responsibility is to continually improve all aspects of the world in which we operate – environment, social, economic – creating a better tomorrow than today.

Our vision is put into action through programs and a focus on environmental stewardship, activities to benefit society, and a commitment to build shareholder value by making PepsiCo a truly sustainable company.

Create customer strategy

If you have your vision, your ideal picture, and have feedback from your customer about your actual performance, you can create a customer strategy!

Which are the improvement areas? Which do matter most? What is your focus? What is your action plan?

Attuning vision

Next to developing and attuning your strategy, you can also [use the feedback to] attune your vision.

If the customer feedback leads to conflicting interests and conflicting values: is it still the right vision you as organization are willing to pursue? Is the feedback just not in line and can you ignore it? Or do you need to drop the customer from your target customers?