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Do you really understand your customers?


The sheer bulk of what is to be steered and the subsequent difficulty in manoeuvering means that 'getting it right' becomes absolutely vital. This sets the scene for everything else. .
             The God Quest .
             High stakes put a premium on the quality and depth of insight that directs the supertanker: how well it is steered. This encourages a 'God quest' approach to research: the quest for ever more perfect information in the hope that perfect information will lead to perfect decision making. Paralysis by analysis is not the only consequence. The God quest generates a dangerous assumption: that 'more' information is the same as 'better'. .
             Push versus Pull .
             Once the company is committed to a particular course of action - such as the launch of the new product -- everything depends on maximising its success: the product has to sell. This has a subtle but fundamental effect on the whole marketing process. The core rhetoric of marketing may revolve around finding out what consumers want and meeting their needs, but given the pressures on the supertanker's bridge, a very different set of priorities soon take over. The day-to-day imperative for most marketers, most of the time, lies elsewhere entirely: not in getting the company to do what the consumer wants it to do, but in getting the consumer to do what the company wants them to do: `buy my product!'. .
             The quest for risk reduction and investment protection mean that marketer 'push' takes over from consumer 'pull'. The driving purpose of consumer understanding ceases to be understanding for the purposes of identifying and meeting consumer needs. Instead it becomes consumer understanding for the purposes of control and predictability: persuading, influencing or even manipulating the consumer to meet the needs of the company by buying. Hence the familiar market researcher's quest to find the insight that will reveal the best consumer `buttons to press' or 'triggers to pull'.


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