Compelling Customer Action
The output variable of strategy in Martin’s updated definition: buy enough of our offering, at sufficient price, often enough, to produce attractive economics.
The generic statement repays close reading: quantity and price. Volume at ruinous prices fails, which is how growth-stage companies die with their best-ever quarters on the board. Fat margin on negligible volume fails, which is how premium niches starve politely. Compulsion means the whole economic sentence comes true at once, over the short and the long term, and anything less is a strategy still waiting for its verdict.
What "compelled" actually means
A customer is compelled when the cost of choosing you is lower than the cost of not choosing you, where cost includes risk, switching effort, approval burden and trust, not just money. This definition does useful work: it explains why technically superior products lose, the buyer's risk and switching costs outweighed the improvement, and why incumbents survive mediocrity, leaving is expensive in ways no comparison chart shows.
Four theories of compulsion
Each is a distinct How to Win family. Superior outcome: using you produces a materially better result the customer can perceive. Lowest total cost of ownership: the lifecycle cost, not the sticker price, and the buyer has to be able to see the lifecycle. Risk elimination: you remove a risk the buyer personally carries, the quiet engine of most enterprise purchasing. Switching-cost inversion: staying compounds in value while leaving becomes re-engineering, advantage that deepens with tenure. Choosing which theory you are running, and building capabilities for that one, is most of what box three demands.
How this connects to OKRs
All strategic roads terminate here because the customer is the only judge, and it gives our methodology its measurement standard: the best Key Results are customer behaviour moving, chosen from whichever compulsion theory the strategy runs on. Adoption deepening, total cost falling, risk incidents eliminated, retention compounding: pick the evidence your theory predicts, and let the quarter test the theory.
Our synthesis of Roger Martin’s published work, sources credited. Read the originals: they’re excellent.
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