Management Archives - Nicholas G. Porter

Asking customer research questions is easy. Getting department heads aligned is the real test.

Companies love saying they care about customers. They put it in the decks, say it in all-hands meetings and build campaigns around being “customer-first” and “customer-obsessed.”

Then someone suggests actually talking to customers and the room gets super tense.

Suddenly, there are a litany of concerns and you end up hearing lots of statements like “We already know this” and “Let’s not slow down.”

All of it is said with a sense of anxiety.

To an outside observer the vibes filling the room must seem like the result of no one knowing how to conduct customer research.

But that’s not it. People know how. Customer research methods are not hidden in a cave somewhere guarded by a dragon.

The concern and anxiety around customer research stems from the fact that it creates customer truth.

And customer truth is inconvenient to just about every department in an organization because it threatens their version of the customer and the very human craving for credibility, status and control.

Every company I’ve ever worked for or consulted with has faced this issue at some point.

I want to help folks avoid this. Because when it goes too far the business really starts paying for it.

Marketing leaders don’t fail because they lack ideas. They fail because lots of marketing plans can’t stand up to scrutiny.

Once it’s held to the fire, the plan gets rewritten over and over until fatigue sets in, focus gets lost and the original plan becomes a hollow version of itself.

Frustrating? Yeah. But this process is often self-inflicted.

If a marketing plan crumbles that quickly, the entire thing becomes negotiable. And, honestly? It should. If it can’t hold up, how strong was it to begin with?

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This is why marketing leaders need a clear and repeatable way to think and operate when the pressure is on and decisions need to hold up.

They need The Marketing Framework.

Because the second a plan leaves the marketing department, it has to make sense to people who were not in the room when it was built.