An old friend of mine asked me recently: "Willem, what would you say is the Tao of marketing?" I had to think about that. ("What would you say is the Tao of Tao?" I first asked.) My best answer would be that the Tao of marketing is the ability to see through our customers' eyes.

Unfortunately, seeing through our customers' eyes is impossible. To see what our customers see we have to not know what they do not know. This is impossible. We always know more than our customers about our company and our product. We can not not know what we do know.

Fortunately, marketing is a bit like playing golf. Even Tiger Woods will never hit 18 holes in one. But we do not need a perfect score to win. We only need a better score than our competition. So how do we improve our customer perspective score?

We do the same thing Tiger Woods does. We study and we exercise. So here are six exercises I described in my book The Marketing You Never Knew. These exercises do not solve problems, they do not build our business, or reduce our costs. These exercises increase our ability to see things right and to do things right.

1. Surround yourself with reality. Recently I delivered the results of a marketing research project to the CEO of a fast moving consumer goods company. Sitting in his office I saw beautiful glass display cases with the requisite little spotlights and mirrors showcasing the company's products. I pointed out to him that whenever his eyes drift to the beautiful glass cases he is un-educating himself. Consumers see a plethora of products, with his products taking up at best 15% of the space. Some of the competitors' products look remarkably like his products. I asked him to do me a favor and replace the glass cases with a typical supermarket shelf displaying both his products and the competition's products. He followed my advice. Now when he looks up he sees reality. I think this will improve his judgment a great deal. It also won't hurt when his marketing managers know that the boss knows and wants to know reality.

"Surround yourself with reality."

2. Talk to your ex-customers. Actually listen to what they tell you. Find out why they left you. Unhappy ex-customers don't make pleasant noises that make you feel nice and warm inside, but they can teach you a lot. Be like the journalist who prefers to talk to a politician's ex-wife rather than to the current wife. MBNA, the credit card company, had its senior managers call and ask ex-customers to come back to MBNA. Undoubtedly more and better learning came about as a result of this exercise than from any polished presentation of research findings by a market research company.

"Talk to your ex-customers."

3. Recruit at least some sales and marketing people and even the new CEO from the ranks of customers. Many companies already do this. IBM in fact saved itself by hiring a big old customer (Lou Gerstner) as its CEO. Just about everybody inside IBM, everybody in the computer industry in fact, knew that IBM needed to split itself up fast in order to have a chance at survival. Gerstner knew little or nothing about computers and less about the computer industry, but he had been a customer and therefore he knew -didn't think but knew- that IBM 's main problem for customers was a lack of cooperation among product and geographic divisions, a problem to be solved not by splitting up but, just the opposite, by increasing integration among the different parts of the company. How come nobody in IBM could see this? Because it's hard to take the customer's perspective when you are not the customer.

"Recruit from the ranks of customers." 

4. Let your customers help you manage. Maybe you should ask potential customers to approve or reject your new advertisements, or at least to sit in on meetings you have with your market research and advertising agencies. A brand manager for a leading detergent in Europe told me "We always get customer feedback before we run any advertisements." But why process your customers' opinions through the filters of your ignorance?

Imagine the advertising agency knows that housewives will approve or reject their advertisements. Will this influence the way they make the advertisements? I think so. They will now try to make advertisements that impress laundry detergent purchasing housewives rather than laundry detergent advertisement purchasing marketing executives. Southwest Airlines does something like this when they ask passengers to make hiring decisions for new customer service personnel. 

"Your customers are the true experts on your customers"

5. Be your own customer. Call your service hotline with a request for help. Undergo the torture you put your customers through. Stay at your own hotel. For example, at some hotels, when I call for ice, after five minutes an attendant comes, knocks on my door and takes away my empty bucket. In five more minutes or so he comes back with the bucket filled with ice. Nice.

But it takes about five seconds to figure out that it might be more efficient to do what most hotels do and bring me a full bucket of ice and take away my empty one. This way the attendant saves time, and therefore the hotel saves money, and I get better service. Why have some hotels not figured this out? The attendants of course don't care; that's why they are attendants.

I suspect that the manager does not know about ice since he does not live in a room, he lives in an apartment in the hotel. So he has a refrigerator with ice and never calls for ice. Recently I found a new twist. The attendant came with a bucket of ice and then, to my astonishment, produced a spoon and slowly scooped the ice from his bucket into my bucket.

"Be your own customer . "

6. Be your competitor's customer too. See how they do things differently and try to figure out why. Continuing on ice, the Shangri La hotel in Beijing puts ice in your room around 5 pm every day whether you ask for it or not. Is it more efficient to do it this way? Maybe not in terms of cost. But every thirty minutes or so, the melting ice makes a little crunching sound, reminding the guest that he could have a nice ice cold whiskey. Perhaps the hotel discovered that it sells more from the mini-bar with its excellent margins through this approach. If you suggest ideas like this to your marketing manager, listen carefully to his response. He might say that he doesn't think this will work for your hotel, or whatever your business may be. Fire him. He is a danger to your business. He tries to do your customers' thinking for them. A good marketing manager will respond that trying the idea on two floors of the hotel and calculating the effect after a month or so will do no harm. By the way, remember to fire your bad managers with the best possible letters of recommendation so that your competitors will hire them. You might even consider monitoring when your competitors have job openings so that you get your timing right.

So shop your competitors in order to better and more fully take your customers' perspective and to find ideas and try them in your own business. If the idea doesn't work, you lose little, if the idea does work you have made your money machine a more perfect money machine.

" Be your competitor's customer too."

Managers are very busy, just like people in every day life they find themselves so busy doing all sorts of different things that they never find time for themselves, time to improve themselves, time to learn, time to think, time to exercise. Companies too are like people in everyday life, too busy with what they are doing, never finding time to work on themselves, busy with what is urgent, not with what is important. The above exercises are maybe not urgent for your company, but they are definitely important.