Seeing Your Customers Through New Eyes

If you see your organization only from its current context, you’ll never envision a new one. That’s because myopic thinking limits your ability to see the whole picture. The same holds true when looking at your customers.

Have you had a difficult time figuring out how to provide your customers with what they really want? If so, here are several insights to gain new perspectives from your customer’s point of view.

Insight #1: Any good asset brought to an extreme can become a liability.

Here’s a piece of advice that might surprise you coming from this bloggist: Be careful that you don’t over survey and over research your customers! View these business-intelligence-gathering practices as a means to an end, not the end goal.

The focus cannot be on research; rather, the focus should be on gaining better insights and then immediately putting those insights into action by making a change in your company that truly delivers an improved service to your customer.

Insight #2: You can’t get to where you want to go until you know where you are now.

Marketing strategies and campaigns sometimes trap a company into a false reality. It’s strange in a way, because marketing campaigns are often expected to be based on some “other worldly” knowledge. Yet, quite often a company’s perceived notion of itself greatly differs from its customer’s perceptions.

With an ongoing marketing program in place, there is great reluctance to stop the program because it may point to an inherent strategic problem. However, by ignoring present-day realities, you can drive your company into to any even more negative market position. If that’s the case, it may be time to stop and reassess your strategic insights and brand campaign.

Insight #3: You rarely make good big decisions from a position of weakness.