Steve Johnson
sjohnson@pragmaticmarketing.com

I want to talk to the president about the marketing people.

Your marketing people are frustrated in their jobs. They put together excellent materials and then your senior management changes them. They research which shows we should attend and you say, "No, let's go to this show instead." They determine the right features for a product and are overruled based on a single anecdote from a sales person.

In his 1991 article "Common Mistakes in New Business Ventures, " Howard Upton wrote, "the most common marketing mistake is for the owner to assume that his tastes, along with the taste of his immediate family, are universal."

After all, all people are just like me, right? I'm in my 40s, I'm white, I'm male, I'm American. Doesn't that represent the world? Or might there be non-white, non-middle-aged, non-male, non-Americans somewhere? And might their opinions and tastes be different from mine?

Sure they are.

Marketing is about listening to our customers; we cannot assume that we represent them, that our personal experience is the same as theirs.

While consulting in Canada, I visited with the company's president before I left for the airport. As so often happens, he asked me to analyze an advertisement as soon as I sat down. "What do you think of this ad? I just don't like it, " he said, "and neither does my wife."

I asked, "How much of your product did you buy last year?" He stared at me blankly, and then I added, "None, right?"

"So, your opinion, while interesting, is not relevant."

The only opinion that matters on advertising (or features, or pricing, or presentation content, or whatever) is the potential customer's opinion. Not the opinions of sales people and developers, not the opinions of executives, not even the product managers. Opinions are not facts.

Marketing is about representing the customer's view rather than the company view. Plenty of folks are talking about what is good and bad for the company; who is representing the customer?

Peter Drucker writes, "Marketing is the whole business seen from the customer's point of view."

What are your product managers doing? Gathering market facts or steering internal planning meetings?

Product Managers should spend more time out of the building than in, spending more time with customers than fellow employees, spending more time listening than talking.