Don't Listen to Customers

My article from an old Media & Tech blog (September 2nd 2011)

(image credit)

Corporate speak on this abounds like pretty wildflowers in the meadows. Focus on customers. Champion customers. The customer is king. Management and staff are so inculcated on this notion that they can probably see such meadows in their sleep!

But in my years of consulting for multinationals, and coaching executives and managers, I have seen that this is in fact easier said than done. Most of the time, instead, corporations speak more on how cool, how innovative, how must-have their products or services are. Sales people are schooled on the features, pricing, and servicing of whatever widget they sell. They’re often driven to hit their sales targets, and their managers put the ‘heat’ on them if they’re falling short. It seems like the last thing on all their minds is what customers want.

So it is in no small measure, then, that Catarina Alexon emphasizes that it isn’t at all about what you want, Mr. or Ms. CEO.

Focusing on the customer is, and always has been, the key to successful marketing. It does not matter what you need or want to tell them since the customers priority is what they, not you, need or want. Usually there is no need to tell them bluntly what you can do, there are more subtle ways to get the message across. Ideally they will get the impression that you are sympathetic with their ideas and desires and care about them.”

Still, why is it so difficult to truly focus on customers? I spoke to the fundamental paradox behind this, in my LinkedIn comment to Alexon’s article:

That said, let me take another slant on this paradox. Henry Ford, prominent American industrialist, revolutionized how the automobile was produced, both in quantity and efficiency. Mind you, the automobile was still in its infancy in the early 1900s. What’s more, Ford apparently didn’t ask what customers wanted. If he had, he would’ve built them a faster horse! Instead of a better automobile, which he actually did.

Enter, too, Steve Job, stage right. 

Soon after his heralded return to Apple in the late 1990s, he and his staff unleashed the cutting edge ad campaign Think Different. This was no ordinary commercial. It literally spoke to the very essence of what Apple was to reveal and, moreover, to the very persona that Jobs was and was to become. The crazy one. The misfit. The rebel. The troublemaker. Have a look.

This documentary reinforced how much Jobs banked Apple’s success on his own self-interest. That he was a one-man focus group. That he didn’t do marketing (or so it seemed). Leander Kahney says,

He doesn’t listen to his customers at all. That’s the last place he’s going to listen to. They haven’t got a clue what they want. He’s inventing this stuff, before anyone has seen anything like it.

So there we have it. If any CEO were to follow Apple’s playbook, and I’m sure many have tried, the last thing he or she would follow would be the advice from Alexon and from scores of management gurus.

So how do we really reconcile this paradox of self-interest versus customer want?

The first, but admittedly dissatisfying, answer from me is, well, there is simply no clear-cut rule or guidance on this. We don’t really know for sure. In one respect, it’s about re-writing the playbook or making your own entirely. But, then, you may argue that many people have done this, and none of them could come close to boasting the level of success that Jobs and Ford have had.

My second answer is this. It’s about having a deeper, perhaps intuitive grasp of the psychology of the market. It’s about having a gut-feel for where consumer trends are heading, before any of these trends get picked by the sophisticated radar of market analysts or corporate CEOs. It’s about, I believe, discerning the unspoken, subconscious needs and wants of people. The ones that Kahney says customers haven’t a clue about. Yes, it’s also about having a vision so clear it emblazons itself into everything you see, and being so tenacious about it that you’re willing to break conventional corporate rules and the rational thinking inculcated into business students. But this vision and passion aren’t enough, unless they come with the intuitive, subconscious grasp I suggest.

Finally, I call upon Nassim Taleb’s emphasis in his book The Black Swan. Namely, that pivotal events – which the preceding decade was replete with, in light of Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, alongside the genius Apple gadgets – are often random and unpredictable. That success can be attributed to plain old luck!

Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!

Ron Villejo, PhD