Only when we build for our customers will they come.

Seth Godin’s blog offers profound, sparse and almost haiku-like wisdom about the new marketing.  If you don’t follow him yet, you should.

In this post, Choose Your Customers, he explains, in very few words, what in my experience is the most common problem leading to product and market failure: when we begin with the product, not the customer.

When we begin with our great product and try to sell it, we are doomed to fail.  If we want people to buy what we do, we have to begin instead with what they need and want, and build (and sell) (and service) from there.

Simple, really – but so easy to forget in the daily muck and bullets of business.