We wanted you to have a good purchasing experience. We wanted you to have a good usage experience. We wanted you to have a good after-usage experience. And ultimately, we were looking for loyal consumers who promoted our brands to their family, their friends, you know, people in the neighborhood. Okay, that was our whole business model.

Why consumers are the bottom line

Cultivating empathy for your customer doesn’t just help you win free advertising — it can also give you better and more accurate insights into your customers. Neither Akio Morita of Sony nor Steve Jobs of Apple ever commissioned market research. Instead, they empathized with their customers and anticipated the kinds of things they would want to see in products.
Failing to empathize with one’s customers is also part of why large, successful companies fail. Consider the decline of department stores that failed to anticipate why customers might prefer the ease and convenience of buying their products online at Amazon, Kodak’s failure to shift to digital film, or Blockbuster’s inability to see that Netflix was a bigger threat than it appeared.
For Lafley, empathy for Procter & Gamble’s customers was a key element to their success. Though it may be tempting to rely solely on a more cool-headed analysis of the market, your customers are ultimately human, with human needs and concerns. Forgetting to tap into that could be a costly mistake. As Lafley put it: “If we won with consumers, and consumers loved our brand and product line, the financial results would come eventually. Always did.”