I’ve posted in the past about what it means to be customer-centric. This is about a related, but more wide reaching topic.

I am sure y’all have heard this a gazillion times before: “the customer is always right”. However, I can bet many of the contexts were comedic. There’s some random person making weird demands. The employee, afraid of being fired with no health insurance, proceeds to fulfill the weird demand. Ensue comedy.

But, if we step away for a moment from that overused trope, the customer is always right is literally true. I chose literally on purpose, it’s not a metaphoric sense of “being right”. It’s not about demands, or opinions, or moral high ground.

It’s about choice. The customers exert the choice, and in doing so they communicate their preference. Added to millions of customers, this becomes an extremely strong force that shapes the market.

To illustrate, I’ll use another overused metaphor the peacock’s tail. That tail was not devised by male peacocks to impress females. After all the brain of male peacocks doesn’t look capable of designing such a marvel. It’s also under-powered for such a cunning fashion-based-rizz strategy.

Instead, the female peacock continuously selected for cumbersome tails. It’s not that they’re big. They’re also colorful. The color is there to help with making the difference between a well maintained tail and a roughed up one. The female peacock doesn’t really care neither about volume, nor about the palette of the tail. She cares about fitness. Large, colorful, well maintained tails means either a lucky male or a very good survivalist. Both are fine, under the circumstances.

The customer is always right has been mocked a lot using examples found in tourism. Crazy tourists asking for dumb things and the staff willingly submitting to the demand. But it is not weird, nor funny. It is what customers selected for. The outlets that manage to do that best, and keep the staff sane and well, make a lot of money. Because those customers don’t care about their demand, they want the experience of being as close to royalty as possible. Because tourism itself – like many other modern things, such as smoking – has roots in upper class habits.

We have to understand that this is what customers selected: tourism as royalty for a day or upper class on demand service. You can’t judge this selection, just as you can’t judge the female peacock for her selection. The female peacock’s pressure is lineage survival and the tourist’s pressure is existential void.

We, the ones making products, are mere executants of the customer’s will. No matter how smart and creative we think we are, in the end, the customers exert the selective pressure. They determine where our smarts and creativity succeed and where they’ll fail.

As a company made of many talented people this is a hard pill to swallow. We may consider that the average, or non-savvy, or mom and pop shop customers need to learn from us what is best for them. But that is a great error. Nobody can tell the female peacock what is good for her. She knows. So do customers. Every crazy need averages out with purposeful and intentful needs.

The customer is always right, means that, overall, we execute our work and pour out talent and energy into a mold shaped by customers, called “the market”.

In my advertising training considering you’re smarter than the customer or that the customer doesn’t know better was a mortal sin. In fact, there is nothing else, but what the customer wants, in two flavors:

• what the customer explicitly wants, and we learn that through market research
• what the customer implicitly wants, and we learn that through market education

Customers are not dumb. They can be tricked, but not fooled. Consumers knew before Nokia MBAs that it’s worth spending more than you have on an iPhone. They saw the potential, because they are the ones experiencing the need. Even the fact that despite all the shortcomings WordPress won is a proof of how smart customers are. They didn’t choose WordPress because how awesome the engineers and designers made it. They chose it because they selected for the right features to be built, for their needs.

The situation as it is makes it dangerous to exploit customer blind spots. For example, their temporary state of being uninformed is risky to leverage. Unless you happen to sell addictive substances and they are hooked on impulse buys. But few are such opportunities! Most of the products we make are healthy and based on free will purchase. We should do our best to determine what the market asks for. Then, we need to execute it with enthusiasm. We should not hold back, even if it is less than what we’d envisioned in an ideal rational situation.

Customers know what they want. It’s hard for them to explain it, sure. Yet, they know what they want in a specific way: when presented with choices, they will make the best one for them, on average. That is why they’re always right.