Do We Always Have to Listen to the Customers?

We all know the drill. The dominant doctrine in marketing theory states that listening to customers is imperative (Kotler et al., 2016). You need to be market oriented. In other words, you need to analyse the market and use the information gathered to adapt the firm’s products and activities to the needs and wants of customers (Duus, 1997; Kastrup-Misir, 2007). But theory is one thing and practice quite another. Many companies do not practise this principle of being market oriented. Empirically, we observe that a variety of alternative conceptions of how to work with the market and the customers co-exist in business. These work well for many of the companies that use them, even though several do not entail asking the customers about anything.