Watched Miami Vice the other night. The drug-dealer made a pretty good marketing comment, "I don't pay for services. I pay for RESULTS."

Marketing, it appears, is almost all about being consumer-focused. But I confess at the outset I can't see a huge advantage in this. Or, rather, it sounds like a truism i.e. which business or institution is NOT 'consumer-focused'? Churches and schools can legitimately be called consumer-focused, but then no one would equate either with the likes of Nike or Microsoft.

I prefer something like experience-focused, sensation-focused, innovation-focused, design-focused, result-focused. The key question then become NOT, "What will consumers pay for?" but, "What will knock the market's hat off its head?!".

iPod, James Bond, Pixar, Swatch, Apple, SIA's 1st Class, Dell, FedEx, etc.

The best companies, IMO, do not look first at the customer, see what they could like, then work on a product. The best companies do instead look at a new perspective altogether, think about a kick-ass design/requirement, then "find their way back" to the customer's needs. In this sense, then, the most consumer-focused companies are so precisely because they didn't take 'consumer-focus' as their starting-point.

Harking back to M.Vice, maybe organisations should think about great result(s) first, then about whether the customer would gush over it/them.

The advantages of adopting this approach is the ability to produce ideas and products/services which leap-frog over competitors. It's operation shock-and-awe (and-reap-big-profits) from the market. Of course AFTER the product launches, the 'basic' customer orientation kicks in: Treat them well, listen to them, involve them, give more-than-requested value, surprise them, stroke them ,etc.

How else does a song with lyrics like, "I've become so numb," make it big on the airwaves? Isn't it because it shocks the pants off people, only for them to "find their way" back to understand it as an expression of adolescent rage?

Market segmentation? I think this is a way of narrowing down who might pay big for your products. So you start thinking in terms of what the demographics, values, willingness-to-pay (Managerial Econs ppl heads up! *smile*), etc.

Yet, to reiterate the point above, I think it's better to put the market segmentation cart AFTER the market innovation horse.