This is the most important advice I can provide from my experience as a marketer and a businesswoman. The complexities of business can drag us into paralyzing debates and prevent us from looking at the final beneficiary of all our efforts – the consumer. It is not what the company can offer, what it can manufacture efficiently, what satisfies the manager’s objectives, what makes great financial sense or what the boss’s wife needs … but what the consumer needs. Sometimes, the need is explicit and sometimes it has to be mined for, uncovering the consumer’s complex motivations, while sometimes it’s ambiguous and needs to be clarified and sometimes it’s just not there and manufacturers create a need. A need has many avatars. And while success can take diverse shapes at the end, a need is a necessary and enabling condition for it. Consumer need clarifies the business’s purpose, defogging the glasses of confusion. But it can be easily forgotten.
