Posted by Dana VanDen Heuvel, June 16, 2010
How often do you see the marketing department blamed for a company that has fallen on hard times or for the closure of a tech startup? Rarely, if ever, is my assessment. Save for notable blunders like New Coke, or KFC underestimating the popularity of Oprah, marketing rarely takes center stage on the front page of the local business section.
Two recent articles got my attention and brought up this topic. One was about a company that we’ve all heard of, Harley-Davidson, and another about a startup that you’ve likely never heard of, Devver.net (maker of coding tools for software developers). Both articles converge nicely on the central issue of customer development over product development and the importance of NEVER taking your eye off of the ball.
The two cases are actually very different, in that Harley is calling for wage concessions, among other things, to keep their facilities in Wisconsin. I’m sure that there’s some part of their overall basket of issues that includes labor, but seriously, when your core customer base is aging boomers (no offense), isn’t the writing on the wall, and shouldn’t customer development be at the top of your list? I feel they they’re not addressing the right problem here.
Devver is a bit more enlightened in that they realized, albeit in hindsight, that their issue was a lack of long term customer development focus. They say, and I quote:
“Our mistake at that point was to go ‘heads down’ and focus on building the accelerator while minimizing our contact with users and customers (after all, we knew how great it was and time spent talking to customers was time we could be hacking!),” writes Brinckerhoff. “We should have [been] asking, ‘Is there an even simpler version of this product that we can deliver sooner to learn more about pricing, market size, and technical challenges?’.”
I’m not advocating the marketers take the blame for anything, or that we shirk responsibility either. If we believe Peter Drucker when he said “The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer,” then it seems logical that our focus should not be on the tactics, technology, labor or anything else that doesn’t support customer development.
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