Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Playing Hide and Seek
Today was another day of clearing out the accumulation of tutorials, newsletters, courses, and ebooks from the past couple of weeks. It's been interesting, I've been checking out some different marketers and have found some interesting approaches to marketing.

Yet while the directions they come from are fresh and different, the destination remains the same: know your customer, serve your customer, see your customer's needs from your customer's perspective.

It's a message that needs to be beaten into all of us, because we marketers so often retreat into playing hide and seek.

Hide and seek?

Why is it that we try to hide behind a product, or a marketing technique, or even behind a massive body of educational materials that we build around us (yes, I'm guilty, as charged on that last one especially) and expect that customers are obligated to play their end of the game, namely to seek us out and find us? I think it's because of the fact that as much as we would like to connect with others, we feel inadequate to be the ones seeking them.

We feel inadequate at getting to know their needs, so we hide behind a business facade that makes us feel that we are reaching out and wait for them to do the real reaching out to us.

That's why, more and more, my gut tells me that growing into a successful business owner and growing into a more successful people person go hand in hand. In the arena of human interrelationships—of which business is just a small part—the person to be is the one who seeks, not the one who hides.
Jeff