Mark Cuban, Internet entrepreneur and owner of the Dallas Mavericks as well as a number of other businesses, recently authored a blog post titled, “Why you should NEVER listen to your customers.” 

While his underlying post makes some interesting points (e.g., “part of every entrepreneur’s job is to invent the future”), the title and overall theme of his editorial sends a harmful message.

In his post he cites an example from a company he works with – “a company that at one point had a product that was not only best in class, but also technically far ahead of its competition.”

His story continues:

“Then it made a fatal mistake.  It asked its customers what features they wanted to see in the product and they delivered on those features. Unfortunately for this company, its competitors didn’t ask customers what they wanted. Instead, they had a vision of ways that business could be done differently and as a result better.  Customers didn’t really see the value or need, until they saw the product.  When they tried it, they loved it.”

I would suggest that the company was asking the wrong questions, the wrong way.  If customers are asked what they want, they are going to respond with what they know.  And what they know is often what you might expect to hear.  As Henry Ford said, “If I asked my customers what they want, they simply would have said a faster horse.”

But what Ford had – and so many successful business leaders have – is an understanding of customers’ needs, motivations and behaviors.  And this understanding comes from listening.  From empathizing.  From looking past what customers explicitly tell you to uncovering a latent need or insight into their lives.  Then solving for it.  It does not come from simply asking what features they’d like.

As Cuban rightly points out, it’s the company’s job to “create the future roadmap for [a] product or service.”  However, doing this without customers – as Cuban suggests to “NEVER listen to your customers” – is a sure path to failure.  Companies will fall into the trap of designing for themselves without seeing the challenge from the point of view of the customer.  Ultimately, it is that customer who will determine the success or failure of an idea or product.

While I don’t know any more about Mr. Cuban’s company or its competitors than what he shared in his post, I do know that never listening to customers is never the right answer.

8 Responses to “Listen up, Mark Cuban”

1. Jeff says:

   April 7, 2010 at 9:47 am

   I work for a company that has made it’s mark on the industry by listening to its customers so I was intrigued by Cuban’s post. As I reflected on my own company it came to me that we implement our customer’s wants and needs on a feature/function level but chart our true path independent of their requests.

   Our company believes in the “conversation” above all else and have helped our customers create their own forum for their community conversations; but I was here when we began to chart our current course and customers didn’t get it, didn’t want it, didn’t ask for it. Now they love it.

   I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on whether customer feedback is better served on the less integral feature/function level while staying true to your own vision is best for the overarching strategy of the company.

   Thank you.
2. Raymond Pirouz says:

   April 7, 2010 at 10:16 am

   Exactly right — this is why ’surveys’ and ‘focus groups’ miss the mark (and give market research a bad name) while those who understand the power of ethnography know that it’s not about literally asking customers “what do you want?” but rather about immersing oneself into the world of the customer in order to understand their perspective on things to know what they truly need. It’s not about asking. It’s about engaging, learning and discovering through a process of empathy and curious observation — and yes, even some listening where appropriate.

   I feel that those who make blanket statements like “don’t ask the customer what they want” but “instead, define the future you see and the sheep will follow” totally miss the point. It’s not an either/or proposition.
3. Jani Fraga says:

   April 7, 2010 at 10:49 am

   I find it interesting that Steve Jobs is so against market research to determine the next Apple product (granted it has really worked for him). To quote Mr. Jobs:

   “It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do. So you can’t go out and ask people, you know, what’s the next big [thing.] There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse.’’’

   Is consumer feedback an accessory to innovation, or is Steve Jobs just on the luckiest streak in history? He does speak of how the developers at Apple focus on their own specific wants or needs for solutions to their current gripes, and he seems to keep hitting the profit mark with his strategy…food for thought. Thank you for this post!
4. Michael Colombo says:

   April 7, 2010 at 10:51 am

   I don’t think Henry Ford had an understanding of customers’ needs, motivations and behaviors. He was an inventor, not a marketer. He had a vision that changed the world. He invented the future.

   I think Jeff and Mark make good points. There is certainly a line to be drawn in the sand between entrepreneurial vision and instincts and listening to the market. I’d guess that most entrepreneurs are not commissioning large research projects to figure out what kind of company they are going to build. Typically that comes in a eureka moment where the innovator sees a problem and thinks of a new way to solve it. In fact, most successful entrepreneurs face lots of nay-saying from folks (potential customers included) telling them their idea will never work, and yet they find the resolve to carry it through nonetheless. Incidentally, the big companies that behave this way are the ones that continue to innovate.

   Once you are in the market, get some feedback for sure as Jeff mentioned, but never lose your vision or stop trusting your instincts. When you do that, you stop innovating and you stop acting entrepreneurial, which I think is what is at the heart of Mark Cuban’s post and Mark Cuban himself.
5. Bill Alberti says:

   April 7, 2010 at 11:10 am

   Jeff, on your question of customer feedback being better served on less integral features or functions, I don’t think it’s fair to assign customer thinking to less important things and keep your vision for more important things. Instead, it may be helpful to think through two different lenses: Feedback and Discovery. If you are looking to refine an idea or product, getting customer Feedback is important – i.e., their reactions to concepts, products and idea. If you are looking to innovate a new approach, you are going to want to broaden the lens with Discovery – i.e., look for unmet/latent needs, competitive white spaces and the like. Strategy is probably better served via Discovery and Tactical execution is probably better served with Feedback. I’m oversimplifying, but hopefully you get the idea.

   Raymond, I agree, it’s not an either/or proposition but a question of how…i.e., how you involve your customers in your business. Are they simply the end market or are they participants in your business? Are you just using them downstream to test and validate or tapping into them throughout an idea’s development cycle. The latter approach will help you develop better ideas. The former will probably kill lots of good ideas.
6. Diane Hessan says:

   April 7, 2010 at 11:42 am

   Great conversation. First of all, there is a ton of controversy about whether Apple listens to its customers or not. Many internal Apple people say that they do, but heck, they might not need to with a Genius like Steve Jobs at the top. The problem that some people miss is that visionaries like Steve Jobs come around once every century. If you don’t have him in your organization, it’s pretty difficult to use Apple as your reason for ignoring customers.

   Re entrepreneurial vision, most entrepreneurs I know started their businesses with a quite different idea and plan than what they ended up with — and sometimes, customers make the initial idea much better. Communispace has this story: we started out in a different space and we actually got the idea for what we do from a client. It was a much better idea than my original vision.

   In general, I agree with you, Bill. Most people who say not to listen to customers have a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of all of what market research can do — especially in 2010. Clearly, if your market research department is just testing and validating what they already know, or asking the wrong questions, your customers will be unhelpful.

   This is a TERRIBLE time to lose touch with customers. Look at Sharper Image or Krispy Kreme or even some unnamed auto companies. As customers of those companies, most of us are pretty sure we could have helped.
7. Michael Colombo says:

   April 7, 2010 at 5:48 pm

   Thanks for the input Diane. I think you are right on that not every company has a vision (or a visionary) like Apple does, but I am not sure the customer’s perspective brings you that culture of innovation either – which might be why it is so rare. However, maybe you have some examples to the contrary.

   I think the distinction between “launch and learn” versus “learn then launch” could be an important one, meaning the context for which you are receiving the feedback is key. So feedback will help you continuously enhance the value of what you deliver and it can also, in some cases, help you validate a concept (which I think you alluded to in your own Communispace story), but I don’t know how much it helps you “invent the future” – which again I think is the punctum saliens of Cuban’s post.

   So if Henry Ford asked for customer input BEFORE presenting them with the automobile, he might have been lead down a different path. However AFTER inventing the automobile, he could then ask a customer how to improve it.
8. Raymond Pirouz says:

   April 7, 2010 at 7:22 pm

   In so far as inventing the future goes, is the future invented in a vacuum?

   Is the inventor basing his/her vision of how things should be by looking down at their twiddling thumbs?

   It’s not an either/or proposition of “do you ask or don’t you ask”.

   Observing people, observing patterns of behavior, observing emerging trends, observing problem areas that need addressing, being inspired by an unmet need based on an observed phenomenon, all of these take place in the context of real human and societal behavior, not some imaginary world in an inventor’s (or entrepreneur’s head).

   You don’t literally have to ask…but it would be dishonest to proclaim that the genius is he who creates the fantastic from his dark lair — with the help of bloated ego alone. :)