Out Come The Buzzwords

It's always interesting to hear Customer Development feedback that comes from outside of the Marketing Department.

In one visit, the Information Technology person asked for a list of best practices that could be publicly verified. Sure. Companies love to publicly share their secrets of success. There aren't many articles titled "Here are the eight ways Burger King clobbered the competition, authored by Burger King."

In another visit, the analyst wanted to know if "AI" would be a key component of any solution? That's not a valid question. That's a buzzword embedded in a sentence. The person wouldn't understand what I meant if I said "what do you think of multi-layer perceptrons?" The person just wanted a box checked.

I was asked if solutions were "agile". Enough. Vendors telling you that you need to be quick and adaptive are one thing ... but of what good is it to provide an "agile" solution (whatever that means) that is quick, adaptive, and awful?

Customer Development is a deliberative, contemplative, thoughtful, tactical approach to growing customers from Acquisition to Welcome to Emergence to Loyalty. You don't cheat the process with "AI" or by being "agile". You do the hard work to put the right merchandise in front of the customer.

If a vendor or co-worker starts throwing buzzwords at you when you discuss Customer Development, please redirect the vendor or co-worker.