What do customers value?

The question, What do customers value?—what satisfies their needs, wants, and aspirations—is so complicated that it can only be answered by customers themselves.

And the first rule is that there are no irrational customers.

Almost without exception, customers behave rationally in terms of their own realities and their own situation. Their "logic bubble"

Leadership should not even try to guess at the answers but should always go to the customers in a systematic quest for those answers.

I practice this.

Each year I personally telephone a random sample of fifty or sixty students who graduated ten years earlier.

I ask, "Looking back, what did we contribute in this school?

What is still important to you?

What should we do better?

What should we stop doing?"

And believe me, the knowledge I have gained has had a profound influence.

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What does the customer value? may be the most important question.

Yet it is the one least often asked.

Nonprofit leaders tend to answer it for themselves.

"It's the quality of our programs.

It's the way we improve the community."

People are so convinced they are doing the right things and so committed to their cause that they come to see the institution as an end in itself.

But that's a bureaucracy.

Instead of asking, "Does it deliver value to our customers?" they ask, "Does it fit our rules?"

And that not only inhibits performance but also destroys vision and dedication.

The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization

Drucker, marketing, branding

In Tiny Product Change, Huge Sales Impact: The Billion Dollar Branding Lesson from Morton Salt the author states: "Peter Drucker has famously said that the only job of a business is to create customers.  He hasn’t said exactly how to do it.  That’s where branding comes in."
Drucker did offer advice on how to create a customer. Chapter 9 "The Purpose and Objectives of a Business" in Drucker's Management, Revised Edition  offers a different thought process. It is fairly lengthy and there is a major, major, major danger in quoting him out of the larger context.
The word "brand" is not the focus of Drucker's thinking. He would probably point out the long list of dead brands.

"… snip, snip … The profit motive and its offspring maximization of profits are just as irrelevant to the function of a business, the purpose of a business, and the job of managing a business … snip, snip … It is a major cause for the misunderstanding of the nature of profit in our society and for hostility profit, which are among the most dangerous diseases of a society or (of) organizations. It is largely responsible for the worst mistakes of public policy—in this country well as in Western Europe—which are squarely based on the failure to understand, the nature, function, and purpose of business enterprise.
… snip, snip … Above all, consumerism should dispel the confusion which largely explains why there has been so little real marketing.
When managers speak of marketing, they usually mean the organized performance of all selling functions.
This is still selling.
It still starts out with "our products."
It still looks for "our market."
True marketing starts out … snip, snip … with the customer, his demographics, his realities, his needs, his values.
It does not ask, "What do we want to sell?"
It asks, "What does the customer want to buy?"
It does not say, "This is what our product or service does."
It says, "These are the satisfactions the customer looks for, values and needs … snip, snip …
Indeed, selling and marketing are antithetical rather than synonymous or even complementary.
Marketing alone does not make a business enterprise … snip, snip …
The second function of a business is, therefore, innovation—the provision of different economic satisfactions … snip, snip …"

Even the quotes above are a misrepresentation of Drucker's mental landscape. Also see chapter 8 The Theory of the Business.

Also see The Definitive Drucker and Marketing in Crisis

Consumerism is the "shame of marketing."

Despite the emphasis on marketing and the marketing approach, marketing is still rhetoric rather than reality in far too many businesses.

"Consumerism" proves this.

For what consumerism demands of business is that it actually market.

It demands that business start out with the needs, the realities, the values of the customer.

It demands that business define its goal as the satisfaction of customer needs.

It demands that business base its reward on its contribution to the customer.

That after years of marketing rhetoric consumerism could become a powerful popular movement proves that not much marketing has been practiced.

Consumerism is the "shame of marketing."

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