“Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers” – Seth Godin

The simplest ideas are the best. But they can also seem the most banal. Hidden in the Seth Godin quote above is, I believe, one of the key differences between a mature and immature organisation. Between a company that is ready for prime time, and a startup that is just finding its feet. Actually, it’s not that hidden, it’s pretty clear – your job is to do what your customers want. When you do, they’ll pay you, and your salary will get paid. The alternative path (thinking that you know better than your customers) is a dangerous path.

I know this seems hopelessly over-simplistic. And of course there’s more to good marketing than that. But it’s about making a choice early on – do you take the red pill of reality, accepting that your customers know more than you, that your job is, fundamentally, to adapt to their needs; or the blue pill of disillusion – that you know better than your customers, that you can “educate” them on their needs? I think the answer is reasonably easy, but why is the pill so hard to swallow?

I’ve just come back from the Sirius Decisions Summit in Vegas. A great event, full of excellent speakers and real insight, as well as some great vendors (6sense was my favourite this time – worth checking out). One of they key messages that I heard repeatedly over the three days was the transformation of organisations from product-centricity to market-centricity. Again, that sounds banal – what does it really mean?

It means a number of things:

1. Your strategic decisions start from the needs of different groups of customers. From there, you work out the most profitable segments, and then what product work to do. You don’t start from your current product and see who needs it.
2. You focus on the people who value you’re offering most (“All customers are equal, but some are more equal than others“). My favourite quote was from Lisa Singer – “The best development teams work on the things that the are most valued by your most valuable segment”.
3. If you don’t know an answer, ask the customers. Assume the (aggregated) customers know more than you.
4. Build your planning cycle from the needs of customer segments inward, rather than starting from your product, and building out “The plan for the product”.

There’s also something else though, that they didn’t mention – and that’s about how we develop our offerings, and how we adjust our course as we get feedback.

There’s a lot of online debate about what Agile development still means, so many years after the manifesto was published. For me, the clue is in the name. It’s not about speed, it’s about the ability to change direction (based on customer feedback!). It reminds me of this quote from Warren Buffett, way back in 1989, talking about ‘institutional imperative’:

 (1) As if governed by Newton’s First Law of Motion, an institution will resist any change in its current direction;

His point, that he makes elsewhere, is that organisations struggle to change direction, once on a given path. It’s reasonable – you’ve thought about your next steps, you have a vision, you don’t want to flip-flop. You don’t want to look like you don’t know the answers.

But what if the customer says otherwise? What do you do if you go out with v0.0.1 and 78% of customers say “You’re wrong – we don’t want this”. Do you stick on your current path, or do you pivot?

This comes back to the humility of marketing, and starting from a belief that the customer is always right. Mark Ritson puts it well here – https://www.marketingweek.com/2018/04/03/mark-ritson-marketers-data-privacy/. That our job as marketers is to ‘listen’ and ‘serve’, not to ‘convert’ and ‘educate’.

What does this mean practically? I always thought Jeff Bezos’s insistence on the “Empty chair for the customer” was a bit cheesy. But it’s not – it’s genius. It reminds you that, in every single discussion you have (whether it’s about a product feature, an advertising campaign, a sales tactic, an invoicing email, anything), you should always be referencing the customers’ point of view – it’s so easily forgotten.

And of course the other way is to do it for real. How often do you talk to customers? How often do they visit your company? How many do you know? Personally? I have a rule-of-thumb that time spent with a customer is never wasted time. You always learn something, and even if you don’t, you do (for example, that many of your customers just want to buy and use your software, and not talk about it much! This is insight).

But lastly, as Mark Ritson points out, you have to start with humility. Once you accept that your customers know more than you – because they’re paying your salary – you’ll find it much harder to fail in any endeavour. At the very least if you’re doing what customers want, there’s a good chance you can build a business on it in the long run.