Traditional marketing in essence has been about doing something today in the hope that your business will reap the rewards in sales tomorrow. The marketer then has her eye firmly fixed on the future. Asking the question, ‘what do I need to do to get us from here to there?’

And yet the best marketing happens in the moment, when the entrepreneur, CEO, waiter, designer or developer takes the time to quietly practice empathy. It turns out that we are at our very best when we really see the world through the eyes of the person we’re trying to matter to.
That’s easy to write and much harder to do than it sounds.

The key to mattering to your customers is to actually care about them just as much, if not more than you do about the success of your business. One of the values of the renowned design firm IDEO is to make others successful, as they say—”going out of your way to help others succeed is the secret sauce.”

Perhaps the question we should be asking, one we don’t ask half often enough is:
“What can we do to get our customers from here to there?”
If you do that often enough the world will beat a path to your door.

Image by Lynda Giddens.