Find out who your real customer is

Every day, on my way to work, I listen to this rock station. The two guys running the show regularly endorse some products, among them teddy bears from the Vermont Teddy Bear Company. Now, at first sight, it may seem strange that a radio station that caters mostly to blue collar macho types goes around endorsing teddy bears. If we look deeper, though, it does make sense. Most women love teddy bears, but it's the guys that buy them for them. Sufficient to say that the DJs pitch the bears as "something that will help you get laid" (pretty raunchy, it's true, but very effective)... You can bet that all those truck drivers and contractors listening to the show are snapping up those teddybears as fast as they can get their credit card out of their pocket! The moral of the story is that the end user is not always our only customer. Our real customer is the buyer, the decision maker. If we forget to find out who is really buying our product, and focus our marketing on them, we may very well be barking at the wrong tree.