At times where everybody is running, be the one walking with the customer

As we are #stayingthefuckhome I have decided to use that time for good and grow my knowledge and get inspired. I bought a subscription to Masterclass, the platform where great people teach their skills, and I am currently taking a course from Sara Blakely founder of Spanx on self-made entrepreneurship. 

There was one topic that struck home, that I have always felt unhappy about during my time working as a Product Marketing Manager. It was that we put growth first and prioritized it over our customers.

Every day, we were running by our customers...

Sara Blakely put it in a few simple but powerful sentences: Rather do it slow but right, don’t chase short-term success.

I cannot tell you how many marketing campaigns & launches I have planned for products that were a mere tool to create new excitement and launch for the sake of launching. Instead of obsessing about the customer and why they needed the product, we obsessed about how our sales would grow with it. Just to find out, that after a while, cannibalization started and there was nothing left from the initial high but the effort we put in and the stress we had because of it. 

The irony of it all was, that then we started to craft campaigns to make the consumers understand the large product portfolio. So, as Sara Blakely put it: Don’t compromise your product & make it really serve a purpose.

...instead of walking WITH them.

We just don’t take time to pause anymore, let our business breathe, observe the reactions of the customer, learn from them and then obsess how we can make it better! We get obsessed with performance instead of what is truly important for our customers.

And that is a pitfall that would kick every startup out of the game. The problem is the big corporations that have enough money and pure force to keep this game running. Zero-sum, but it runs.

So, what I hope is that this current crisis, which forces all of us to pause and reflect on how we did things in the past and if the assumptions still hold and are sustainable for the future, we also get a chance to do things differently. To remember that quantity doesn’t go over quality and growth over customer. And that great things only develop with time and in the long-term walking is way more effective and healthier than running.