Successful Marketing Is Achieved Through Focusing on the Customer’s Wants

“Your Marketing Strategy starts, ends, lives, and dies with your customer.

“So in the development of your Marketing Strategy, it is absolutely imperative that you forget about your dreams, forget about your visions, forget about your interests, forget about what you want–forget about everything but your customer!

“When it comes to marketing, what you want is unimportant.

“It’s what the customer wants that matters.

“And what your customer wants is probably significantly different from what you think he wants.” (p. 218)

Turning Your Business Pla into a Game

“…People do not simply want to work for exciting people. They want to work for people who have created a clearly defined structure for acting in the world. A structure through which they can test themselves and be tested. Such a structure is called a game.

“And there is nothing more exciting than a well-conceived game.

“That is what the very best businesses represent to the people who create them: a game to be played in which the rules symbolize the idea you, the owner, have about the world.” (p. 202)

How to Measure Business Success

“…On its own, Innovation leads nowhere. To be at all effective, all Innovations need to be quantified. Without Quantification, how would you know whether the Innovation worked?

“By Quantification, I’m talking about the numbers related to the impact an Innovation makes…

“The sad fact is that Quantification is not being done in most businesses. And it’s costing them a fortune! …

“Begin by quantifying everything related to how you do business. I mean everything.” (p. 127-8)

Innovation Focused on the Customer is Central to Business Success

“Innovation is the heart of every exceptional business. Innovation continually poses the question: What is standing in the way of my customer getting what he wants from my business?

“For the Innovation to be meaningful it must always take the customer’s point of view. At the same time, Innovation simplifies your business to its critical essentials. It should make things easier for you and your people in the operation of your business; otherwise it’s not Innovation but complication.

“Innovation, then, is the mechanism through which your business identifies itself in the mind of your customer and establishes its individuality. It is the result of a scientifically generated and quantifiably verified profile of your customer’s perceived needs and unconscious expectations.

“It is the skill developed within your business and your people that is constantly asking, ‘What is the best way to do this?’ knowing, even as the question is asked, that we will never discover the best way, but by asking we will assuredly discover a way that’s better than the one we know now.” (p. 121)

How Entrepreneurs Think: The Entrepreneurial Personality

“So the work of an Entrepreneur is to wonder…to imagine and to dream. To see with as much of herself as she can muster the possibilities that waft about in midair someplace there above her head and within her heart. Not in the past but in the future. That’s the work the entrepreneurial personality does at the outset of her business and at each and every stage along the way. I wonder. I wonder. I wonder. Just as every inventor must. Just as every composer must. Just as every artist, or every craftperson, or every physicist must. Just as every baker of pies must. I call it Future Work. ‘I wonder’ is the true work of the entrepreneurial personality.” (p. 33)