Where is your business in terms of its life cycle? Corporations, like all living things, go through a progression of changes that begins with its birth, growth, maturity, decline and death. Of course, no one wants to be on the downside of their corporation’s life, but all things come to an end, even very large organizations. Where are the Titans of Industry of the past, such as Kodak, TWA, Montgomery Ward, Standard Oil, WorldCom, Blockbuster, Lehman Brothers, Borders Bookstores or Compaq Computers? Was there something each of these giant enterprises could have done to stave off their corporate death? Maybe, and it has to do with a key marketing mistake that many companies make at the peak of their success.

All businesses strive to get to the mature level and stay away from decline. But what happens when you get to the top? Hubris is a Greek word. It means excessive pride or self-confidence. It has blinded the eyes of many successful people indiscriminately: politicians, movie stars, athletes, and common people who find success in business. The problem with hubris is it deludes our thinking so that we believe we are the only ones who see what will work in our business. But who really decides what will work and what will not? It is your customers! They are the ones who decide to buy or reject what you are selling. This is where marketing comes into play.

One of the most important exercises we do with our clients is a market analysis. Among other things, we identify who makes up the very best customers they could accumulate. We talk about the psyche of these customers. What do they value? What are their attitudes? What choices do they have when considering buying your products and services? We let the decision-makers in the company give us their input on how these customers think. At this point in the exercise, we often pull out a survey of actual customers and compare how the business insiders’ thoughts are with actual customers. Would you be surprised if I said that many times, these two lists don’t have much in common? Here is the marketing fork in the road. Faced with the thinking of their customer base, the business leader has to make a choice: follow my own line of thinking and keep going the direction that has already made us a success or make a change based on what the customers are saying.

The opposite of hubris is humility. The famed author C.S. Lewis defined humility this way, "Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it is thinking of yourself less.” In other words, in the business sense, it is putting the wisdom of the people who are buying from you ahead of your own perception. Does that mean that all successful business leadership is about giving way to every idea that blows in with the wind? Of course not, but the know-it-all attitude gets in the way of effective marketing and leads to corporate decline.

Here is the bottom line: you will never trump the customer in business. They are the ones that matter most. Customer wants and needs will change with the times. Smart marketing, especially when you are on the top of your business mountain, takes the opinions of the customer into consideration and changes to meet their needs. If you don’t, you will find yourself on the downside of your maturity peak. And if you take that slide, you will look back and see the crumbling took place under the weight of your own hubris. Take a look at the people around you. Stop and listen to them. Analyze what they are saying and doing. Make your business decisions, especially your marketing decisions, based on what you are observing. Don’t let your own self-regard be the end of your organization.

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Original photo by Valdemaras Deko