BJ Bueno

Your job isn’t to create needs for your customers. Customers—humans—do a fine job of that on their own.

Your job is to make your customers aware of their existing needs. When you do this successfully, you trigger motivation in your customers. This motivation leads your customers to take action.

A customer named Lisa walks into your store.

As she roams the aisles, her eyes gaze at an endless sea of colors and forms. She isn’t overwhelmed; she’s accustomed to endless choice.

Her mind is elsewhere. Something her daughter asked her this morning amuses her. She feels joy. Now she wonders if her husband kissed her before he left for work. A feeling of disconnection comes and goes.

Tim works down the street. He rushes into your store. Late for a meeting, he stepped into a puddle after lunch and his damp socks are bothering him.

He grabs the first pair of black mens dress socks he finds, pays for them, and hustles back to work.

Sandra takes a trip to your store after work. It’s her friend’s birthday and she needs the right gift. She always finds what she needs at your store.

Tim and Sandra are both your customers. They both contribute to your bottom line. But only one of them will lead to long-term profitability in up and down markets.

We now have access to limitless customer data.

But for business leaders who are committed to knowing their customer, the numbers alone will never be enough.

Why? Because human beings aren’t statistics.

“The history of the present King of Great Britain,” Thomas Jefferson writes in the Declaration of Independence, “is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”

Jefferson goes on to list 26 items as evidence of the king’s tyranny. This evidence, which takes up more than 50% of the Declaration itself, was vital to the document’s purpose: to rally the people of the thirteen colonies, to stand united as one people.

And like all great leaders of Cult Brands, the founding fathers of the United States knew that in order to stand together, you need an archenemy to stand against.

Your customer has many options.

They can meander into your store or stop by your competitors’.

On their devices, they can do the same or let Google offer dozens of other alternatives they might not even know exist.

How do they really make their decision on where and what to buy? More importantly, what can you do to influence their decision to choose you?