Many of these email tips involve strategies and tactics for demand generation. But marketing starts with knowing your customer and understanding what they want. As marketing guru Seth Godin says, “Don’t find customers for your products; create products for your customers.”
I am frequently not just surprised but amazed as how difficult it can be to get a company to do the most basic market research: talking with their customers. When creating a new company, or even just a new product, this is absolutely the most valuable investment of time and money you can make. The returns can be huge.
When you’re working on a new product or service, sound out your customers (and potential customers) about it. Make sure that they understand that you’re not trying to sell them something, that you truly would value their input. Show them a prototype, or even just some sketches and wireframes. Get their suggestions for improvements. Find out what they are using now that your offering would replace. And ask them point blank if they really would buy and use it.
In many cases, if your idea is any good at all, you’ll not only get good suggestions for improvements, but a significant number of people will likely say to you that they want to know when your product is ready because they’ll want to buy it.
I know: Steve Jobs didn’t believe in market research. He would quote a fictitious comment from Henry Ford that “If we had asked customers what they wanted they would have told us a faster horse.”
Well, Steve Jobs was a genius. Few of us have his intuitive sense for the direction of the industry, or his extraordinary set of collaborators. If you truly have a groundbreaking innovation that people will need to use to appreciate its value, maybe this market research won’t work. But for those of us – the vast majority of us — who are producing incremental improvements in the how we live and work, it can be invaluable.
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