The customer ”trends” that matter most today are individual changes in the individual lives and desires of each of your customers.
Although I write a lot and give quite a few keynote speeches to conferences and businesses about the trends in customer desires and expectations, I want to concede something rarely admitted by business trendspotters: The most important changes to keep track of as a business owner are the individual changes happening to each of your customers.
Is your customer richer than the last time you worked with her? Poorer? Recently single or newly married? Does she have a new pet or is she grieving for one that has died? No matter how big you grow, or want to grow, as a company,
individual customers buy from you, not assemblages of customers, not
slices of a market.
Being aware of underlying trends in the marketplace is essential for the success of any business that relies on significant numbers of transactions and on forward-looking planning. But learning to treat individual customers truly as individuals, honoring individual preferences unique to that customer, is even more central to business success.
