In discussing your small business’ marketing, have you or someone you know ever said something similar to the following?

• “Google AdWords is a waste. When I search for something I never look up at the paid boxes.”
• “I hate those coupon packs in the mail. I don’t even open them; I just toss them straight in the trash?”
• “I would never run TV spots. I haven’t seen a commercial in six months because of TIVO.”

If you have based your marketing decisions on anything similar to the above, then you’ve made one of the great mistakes in small business marketing:

You confused yourself with your customer.

Many small business owners (including one I see in the mirror each morning) have fallen victim to the idea that because they wouldn’t react to a certain marketing strategy or medium, then their customers wouldn’t either. In logic, this is known as the Hasty Generalization Fallacy, extrapolating a general rule from a particular case. In business, I call it the Marketing-Me Syndrome, assessing marketing effectiveness through personal preferences.

The Marketing-Me Syndrome is played out in C-Suites and small businesses across the world on a regular basis. Sure, it seems obvious that your customers’ potential reaction, not yours, should dictate marketing strategy. However, many things that are obvious when you are coolly reading a blog post are forgotten when you begin to rail against how much you hate companies that leave poly bag flyers on your front door. In the reaction of the moment, your opinion jumps in front of your analytical abilities. You hate poly bag flyers on your door, so everyone must also. That’s the way you feel, and that’s the way it is. Except for one problem:

Your customers might not feel the same way you do.

No Really, You Are Not Your Customer

Of course, many small business owners have a lot in common with their customers and tend to think that these commonalities make them the same. Yet, often it is the small differences that create a real disconnect between which marketing strategies are effective and which are not.

• Do you work a 9-5 job yet sell services to small business owners – you are not your customer.
• Do you sport a “Y” chromosome yet sell to a clientele that is 90% female – you are not your customer.
• Do you have two employees yet sell HR solutions to companies with over 100 employees – you are not your customer.

Oftentimes, we are similar to our customers; in fact, those similarities sometimes inspire our businesses. Take for instance the suburban housewife who has an idea for a small business that fills a need for other suburban housewives. Can she relate to her target demographic? Yes. Does she understand her market? Probably. Is she her customer? Probably not anymore.

You see, our heroine is no longer a stay-at-home mom; she is a small business owner/stay-at-home mom. She has different stresses, time pressures and concerns than the group she was once a part of. And those differences could have a major impact on what marketing mediums reach her and which messages she responds to. Simply put, she is no longer her customer.

So What’s a Small Business Owner to Do?

The tendency to extrapolate from our own experiences and biases is, of course, natural and all too human. However, it can be a fatal flaw in analyzing marketing opportunities. In small business, we often are at a data disadvantage compared to our large company brethren. While online marketing does allow for inexpensive data-driven approaches that are usually within the reach of small business, offline marketing most often does not. Small business owners are often left with nothing more than anecdotal evidence and pure “gut” when analyzing marketing opportunities.

Now, I’m certainly not saying to ignore your gut or to shun your intuition, as those are big parts of succeeding in small business marketing. Sometimes, we have an innate wisdom within us that can point us in the right direction without the benefit of a double blind study or multi-month beta testing.

The key is to refine which gut you are listening to. Taking the time to differentiate between how you would feel and how you think your customers would feel. Making sure to understand the differences between how a marketing approach would affect them, not you.

While this approach seems to come naturally in the sales process, where analyzing the wants and needs of the customer is expected, it seems to get lost more often in marketing, where the customer’s needs can be more easily forgotten.

How To Avoid Marketing-Me Syndrome

Let us first state for the record: you do not need to be your customer to sell to your customer. However, you do need to make sure you are viewing the world through their eyes, not yours. Get to know your customers, even if anecdotally. Try to take a step back from your own opinion, and think about how your customers might be different than you.

Then, the next time you’re being pitched a new marketing idea, and you realize that your only objection is I would never respond to that. Keep listening and think about who your customers are and what they want. You might just find out that your customers are a lot of things, but one thing they’re not is you.

So… Have you ever fallen victim to the Marketing-Me Syndrome? Have you ever had a client refuse a certain marketing strategy because he “hates getting those things”? What techniques have you found useful to separate your own opinion from those of your customers?

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