Market fit
You are not your customer
Businesses ignore customers, when they develop a product
Businesses fail as they stop working for their customers. Instead, they work on new, shiny and irrelevant projects.
Tata Nano failed as it aimed to produce the world’s cheapest car. Customers did not aspire for the cheapest car. In 1980s Levis launched tailored suits. The focussed group study suggested that the prospective customers did not like the product. It failed. Wang Labs challenged IBM before Apple did. It produced electronic word processors. It failed, as it did not build products for the personal computing era.
Marketing guru Marc Ritson writes, “You help produce the product, ergo you are not the consumer of it. Learning to separate your own instinctive thoughts and feelings from the actual insights from real consumers is, literally, the first thing a trained marketer learns to do well.”
The goals of businesses should be to sell the products to the end consumer. Art Gallery owner Emmanuel Perrotin said that if the piece did not sell, it wasn’t the work of art. Without attracting the ordinary people, and selling to them no businesses will succeed.
