One of the foundations of successful business is understanding customer needs. Really understanding their needs. Developing a deep, almost visceral understanding of what customers’ need lies at the heart of innovation to create winning new products and their marketing to target customers. As Peter Drucker said, ‘because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs’.
 
But understanding customer needs is not as easy as it sounds. You can’t just go out and ask customers what they need. As Lance Bettencourt showed in a recent article on the Debunking Myths about Customer Needs, it isn’t because customers don’t know what their needs are, but because they come mixed-up with wants, expectations, benefits, and above all solutions. If we struggle to define what a need is in a universally accepted way, what chance do we have of marketing, sales and service agreeing on a common customer management strategy? Precisely nil, if like me, you often sit in meetings with marketing and sales people (service is not usually invited) talking mutually incomprehensible languages.
 
Read the entire CustomerThink article.