Consumer Focus

What? Producers should have a focus on consumers? Explain!

Explain I will. Every Producer makes something of value, and that thing is traded to someone else in exchange for another thing of fair value, typically money. That buyer is called a consumer or customer. Now this person is not the formal Consumer I have defined elsewhere, but simply a person who consumes a good or service. The predominant role of that person might be Producer for all we care.

The point is that Producers must always be mindful of who purchases their products. A computer programmer sells his product to his company, and more immediately, his supervisor. A landscape architect sells her plans to a private homeowner or a construction company. A stained glass artist sells his art to the public out of a storefront or on ebay.

To produce the most and sell the most, you have to know your customer. This seems so basic as to be silly, but Producers are sometimes so intent on their product, they forget this rule. For example, the computer programmer might tell his boss, “I’m not working over the weekend; you’ll have to get Bob to finish this program.” That’s bad for the boss and for Bob! The programmer should not allow himself to be abused, but getting your product finished on time is what life is about. Else the boss could hire a Paraducers and get the same poor performance writing computer programs, but with more entertaining excuses!

What good is producing excellent stained glass artwork if each piece is too large and expensive for your customer to afford? What good is drawing up landscape plans that clash with the surrounding environs and properties?

As a Producer, you have to listen constantly to your customers, your consumers. They are telling you what they want and how you can be successful. Some things they say are admittedly crazy, but now and again you will hear just the bit of advice you need to push your franchise forward and increase your value. You have to sell something that someone wants! One of my favorite song lyrics is from a 1970’s Deep Purple tune called “No One Came”.

Lot’s of great Producer singers and musicians have this problem. They Produce wonderful songs that no one wants to hear. No one comes from miles around, so they work at the local music shop.

The computer programmer’s boss wants a few simple things to make his life easier: Be sure the program meets the specification, be sure it is tested, and be responsive on repairs when bugs are found. The customer of the architect has a few basic requirements: The design must be visually appealing and inexpensive to implement and maintain over the years.

Producers who ignore their consumers (typically their employers) or don’t listen closely end up out of work, with no customer. If you have no customers, then you will have no money. Since every dollar is also a vote, that’s going to diminish your power in society, and you would be letting the rest of us Producers down.

Paraducers and to some extent Consumers have a hard time appreciating Producers, but don’t let that stop you from suggesting how the value of your product or service could be increased for them. For example, people ask me to write computer programs, sometimes with ridiculous ‘features.’ Mostly these are functions requested out of an innocent lack of knowledge of how technology works, which is no big deal. I respond with some options to help accomplish their goal in a better way. Listening to customers is important here, else you might become committed to providing a product or service that is physically impossible in our space-time continuum.

Unfortunately, our customers don’t always understand us very well as Producers. They think of us as esoteric eggheads, pie-in-the-sky thinkers, noncommittal engineers, or just incomprehensible geeks. No Paraducer is going to make the effort to get to your level intellectually. You have to make that effort, not so much to understand your customer, but to please him or her. Your Paraducer boss has to make that lease payment on his BMW (who would lease a BMW?), and you’ll never understand that, or his alimony payments, or the boat he bought but never uses. But you and he can understand that you both win when you Produce the product your company needs, and then he can lease a Mercedes, too! That’s being consumer focused.

All the while you must be looking forward to the day when your Producer children will be in charge, and will not have to suffer these incongruities. What stories they will tell. “My mother worked in a company for a manger who had never Produced any of the products they were selling! Can you believe that?”