[1-3-1] Market orientation
"You are not the customer." Hearing what the audience hears. Building something that has to work. And the disruptive work hiding in blind spots.
I’m experimenting with a new format for Thought Dumpling this week that I’m considering turning into an ongoing series. Short of a clever name, I’m calling it 1-3-1. The premise is: One idea I’ve been thinking about, three related examples that help explain or expand on the idea, and a lasting question to help you apply it. I hope you enjoy reading it.
One idea
“You are not the customer.”
I was four years into my marketing career when my manager shared some fundamental advice that changed how I approached my work. He was giving me feedback on some website copy I had written. The page was marked up with helpful but also humbling comments and notes. There was one paragraph I’d written after a conversation with one of the product managers that included too much jargon and complex information. My manager highlighted the entire paragraph and left the feedback: ‘No one actually talks about the product like this. Customers won’t understand what any of it means... You are not the customer!’ It turns out there’s a term for what my manager was getting at: ‘market orientation,’ which is essentially the idea that once you’re on the inside working for a company, you’re too close to the product to be objective, and you can’t assume that the customers you serve think or behave or speak as you do.
Mark Ritson, a former marketing professor, puts it best: “It basically means you don’t know anything because you’re making the thing,” he says. “You’re producing it, you’re marketing it, and as a result, you are not the consumer and everything you think is biased and wrong.”
To counter this bias, good marketers orient themselves to the market by conducting research. Similar to how stand-up comedians refine their routines by testing material in front of live audiences, they want to see how the audience experiences a joke. Because it doesn’t matter whether a comedian thinks a joke is funny; it’s the audience—i.e., the market—that determines whether it actually is.
The concept of market orientation, and looking at things through the eyes of others, is the idea for this week’s 1-3-1.
Three examples
You have to hear what the audience hears
Sometime in the early 70s, Keith Richards was asked by a music journalist whether his guitar style had changed and whether he thought he was still improving as a musician. “Yeah, I think so,” Richards responded. “I’m not the sort of person who could carry on in the face of knowing that I wasn’t doing better than I was doing a few years ago.” Richards said the same for the rest of the members of The Rolling Stones: “Nobody could or would do it if they felt they were just going over the same old thing.” Creative stagnation was a challenge for The Rolling Stones at the time, who were at the peak of their popularity. Tours were long, intense, and exhausting efforts as they traveled the globe playing to sold-out crowds in stadiums and arenas. And the scale of the shows meant there were long gaps between tours. All of this afforded little opportunity for spontaneity or experimentation. Richards’ idea to ensure the band kept evolving was to break with the traditional tour model and reconnect with audiences in smaller, more intimate settings. He said that if they were going to play stadiums, they should also play in a small club the next day. “There’s no reason not to,” said Richards. “There’s no reason why you shouldn’t play Madison Square Garden or play the Bottom Line and do a live stereo FM broadcast from there, to think about the audience in that way,” he said. “Because there’s nothing like it for a band to play in a small room. After all, that’s where we put it all together in the first place. In these large auditoriums, half the time you’re fighting the environment. In a club, you’re hearing what the audience is hearing, and there’s no middle man.”
Building something that has to work
Author Daniel Pink (Drive, To Sell is Human, The Power of Regret) learned that the way to write and deliver a good speech is to study the audience, not the presenter. “When I watch other people give speeches, I will position myself in a way that I can see both,” he said. “I want to see what the speaker is doing, but I also want to see how the audience is doing.” He takes a similar approach to writing plays, too. He analyzes his plays in great detail, using audience reactions to understand the flow and the “laugh density” of the story. In one of his plays, he noticed a section that was heavy on exposition and plot progression, but low on laughs. For a play meant to be a comedy, Pink was concerned the audience might get confused. “They’ve been laughing at a regular pace for the first four scenes, and suddenly, in the fifth scene, there are no laughs,” he said. “I gotta up that.” For Pink, this detailed analysis he does with his work is why he believes writing is “less of a kind of art” and more of a task of “engineering” where the audience and their reaction determine how it comes together: “You’re building something that has to work,” he said, “and you’re testing it, you’re stress-testing it.”
Disruptive work hides in the blind spots
When Brian Koppelman (Billions, Rounders, and others) was 21 and in college, he was leading a protest against his university for accepting donations from companies that support apartheid in South Africa. Through this work, he came across a young musician named Tracy Chapman and began working with her, leveraging his dad’s connections in the music business to try to get her a record deal. When pitching Chapman, Koppelman pointed to her moving lyrics, emotionally-charged songs, and the cult-like following she had developed among fans thanks to her performances at college campuses. But he struggled to get the major record labels to take her seriously as a commercial artist. “I would watch executive after executive watch her and be personally moved by it, sometimes with tears in their eyes because what she’s singing about was so important and her voice was so beautiful,” Koppelman said. “Then they would say, ‘Now you know, we can’t possibly sign her at Columbia Records’.” The record label executives were looking at Chapman through their own lens, which was blurred by bias and prejudice. According to Koppelman, they didn’t think Chapman would be successful because she was black and too masculine, and they disregarded her popularity among college students as “bullshit.” Even when Koppelman finally signed Chapman to a label, few people in the industry believed she’d sell many albums. Chapman released her first self-titled album on April 5, 1988. By July of that year, it would reach platinum status, having sold over 1 million copies. It later went on to sell over 20 million copies. Chapman would also win multiple Grammys for that album and become one of the most influential singer-songwriters of her generation. The executives, as Koppelman noted, couldn’t see past their own blind spots. “It was totally against what was going on in music at the time,” said Koppelman. “So, because they were on the inside, all the defenses they had up were actually valid defenses that usually you ought to have up. They just couldn’t understand that this was disruptive.”
One question…
What I like most about this concept of market orientation is how it brings clarity to a problem. Whether it’s removing the elements that stand in the way of you and the market, analyzing the reaction of a crowd, or acknowledging the internal defenses you’ve unknowingly put up, a simple change of perspective is how you get clarity about what to fix and how to get better.
Which leaves us with the question:
If you looked at your problems from another angle, what would you see, and how would it change how you solve them?