Do customers matter to your Business?  Do you study their habits, pay attention to their needs, and work to communicate with them?  If so you already think like a marketer.

Marketing helps create and sustain the customer relationships that are vital to the success of your business.  You can help your business become more competitive by cultivating a marketing orientation.   Your business has a marketing orientation when everyone works to:

  • Understand the customer.  How do your customers behave? What do they need? What’s affecting their lives?
  • Satisfy the customer’s wants and needs.  Develop products and services that are different. Provide these products not just for customers’ stated needs, but for their unexpressed needs as well.
  • Create awareness and interest in your products and services or ideas. Produce engaging content and make connections with customers.

A marketing orientation doesn’t require technical expertise, instead it’s a continual focus on the question: Why should some buy my product, adopt my idea, or try my service instead of someone else’s?  

Marketing is not just the responsibility of one department or a group of experts.

Do you think of marketing as something that’s “nice to do” but not necessary? This thinking can be a dangerous trap.

Guard against these attitudes:

  • There’s no substitute for what we make or do. Technology has made innovation faster and product life cycles shorter than ever. Customers will replace any product or service that doesn’t remain relevant.
  • We can always cut costs. This may yield short-term profit gains. But this strategy isn’t sustainable over the long term.
  • Population growth and wealth expansion will continually give us new customers. Every industry goes through cycles of expansion and contraction.  Businesses that continually work to provide better value to customers are the ones who will survive downturns.

Research your customer.  Customer trends evolve.  That’s why you need to continually listen, gather data, and look for patterns.  Some useful research questions include:

  • What do your customers value?
  • What results do they want?
  • How do they want those results delivered?
  • What price are they willing to pay?
  • What is changing in their lives?
When you conduct customer research, clear you mind of preconceived ideas about what you’ll learn.  Often, the most important insights are surprising.