Stanford Business School Research: Be Careful What You Ask Your Customers.

STANFORD, Calif. -- If you're interested in business, you've probably heard the "know your customer" mantra more times than you'd care to remember. Major enterprises spend billions of dollars a year on business intelligence software used to mine customer information from corporate databases, and on painstaking market research and consumer surveys.

Every year, thousands of shoppers are buttonholed as they enter stores or call customer service centers and then are quizzed about their shopping experience.

There is no doubt that understanding the needs and wants of customers in an ever-more competitive economic environment is critical. But in a series of studies, Itamar Simonson of the Stanford Graduate School of Business has demonstrated that information gleaned from some widely used types of customer surveys can be misleading and even counterproductive.

"People in business greatly exaggerated the value of matching the consumer's presumed preferences and giving them what they want," he says. Indeed, "measuring consumer ...