Market Immersion

Want to question someone’s sincerity? Just say their work or ideas are ‘focus-group tested’. Authentic brands never ask customers about innovations. After all what would they know? As one designer said, ‘How would customers know how to use an iPod if their only experiences were with CD players? If Apple had asked customers about an iPod prototype, customers would have wondered, “How do I load songs onto it? Where are my CD covers with the words on them? How will I know what songs are coming up?” They would’ve been bamboozled by the iPod, but now everyone can’t imagine life without one’ (Beverland and Farrelly 2007, p. 10). As academia’s best marketing writer puts it (referring to the decrease in spontaneity in the later Harry Potter books): Most mainstream marketers, admittedly, will maintain that the customer is always right, that the sales figures speak for themselves, that the public gets what the public wants. This may be so, but it’s also true to say that the customer is always right wing — conservative, reactionary, stuck-in-the-mud — that sales figures don’t always speak the truth, and that the public shouldn’t always get what the public wants. (Brown 2007, pp. 189–90) As Charles Morgan says, ‘customers always have a viewpoint, but they’re often wrong.