I’m sorry to break it to you, but your customers don’t really care about you.
They don’t really care about your new listings, your dedication to customer service, or the fact you’ve finally managed to get the new negotiator to appear in your latest Instagram Reel.
They’re busy. They’re tired. They’re juggling work, kids, bills, and the prospect of moving house.
One marketing legend put it far more bluntly: “Marketers should have a Post-It note above their desk saying: the customer doesn’t give a shit.”
Brutally refreshing, and the single most important starting point for great marketing.
Why So Many Companies Get This Completely Backwards
Most businesses begin their marketing in exactly the wrong place: with themselves.
Their brand. Their message. Their goals. Their opinions.
It’s what Mark Ritson calls the marketer’s greatest delusion: thinking our experience of the world resembles anyone else’s.
It does not.
We are not normal. We are not typical. We are not the customer.
In fact, the moment you sign the employment contract, you stop being a consumer and transform into something far weirder: a biased, blinkered, internally-obsessed version of yourself who treats brand videos like cinema and reads social media analytics for fun.
It’s the reason so much marketing ends up bland, baffling, or - worst of all - entirely ignored. When the starting point is us, the ending point is usually irrelevant to the consumer.
Market Orientation: The 180° Turn That Changes Everything
Market orientation sounds like a complicated academic concept, but actually it’s beautifully simple:
Start with the customer, not the company. Understand how they think, not how you hope they think. Talk about what matters to them, not to you.
This shift doesn’t just change your marketing. It changes your priorities, your planning, your pricing, your content, your campaigns, your everything.
It is, quite simply, the foundation of all great marketing.
And yet… most companies don’t do it.
Most companies think they do it.
According to research, 56% of firms believe they’re customer-centric, while their customers strongly disagree.
That’s more than half of businesses living in a lovely, comforting la-la-land.
So Why Do We Keep Getting It Wrong?
Because real market orientation is inconvenient.
It tells us uncomfortable truths and forces us to listen. It requires humility - and what business leader wants that on a Monday morning?
It means setting aside assumptions, shelving egos, and temporarily admitting we might (just might) know less than the people buying from us.
A market-oriented company doesn’t launch campaigns based on “vibes,” “gut feel,” or “how we’ve always done it.”
Instead, you’ll see signs like customer research shaping strategy, clear segmentation of audiences, messaging written in customer language, not internal jargon, propositions based on real needs, not assumptions, and a culture of curiosity, not certainty.
At Unchained, we exist to solve growth through insight - not guesswork. That’s baked into our values, our mission, and everything we create.
And the biggest problem we kept seeing?
Businesses telling us they “knew their customer,” when in reality they were still working from assumptions, anecdotes, or “that one time last summer when a vendor said…”
So we built Customer DNA - a way to give you the kind of deep, geodemographic insight that fuels true market orientation.
Not personas you imagine, but real data showing who your customers actually are, how they behave, what motivates them, what stops them taking action, what they value, how they make decisions, what messages they respond to…
And when you feed that into your marketing strategy (let alone an LLM), everything sharpens.
Your messaging becomes clearer, your brand becomes more focused, and your campaigns stop shouting into the void and start hitting the mark.
Before you write a post, launch a campaign, hire an agency, or brief your team, ask:
“What does the customer actually want?”
Not: “What do we want to tell them?” / “What do we want them to know?” / “What do we want them to buy?”
But: “What matters to them, in their world, right now?”
Because that’s where all good marketing lives - where customer needs meet business strategy.
So What’s the Takeaway?
A simple one:
You are not the customer, your opinion isn’t the truth.
And the sooner your marketing starts from that place - with humility, curiosity, and real insight - the sooner you’ll create work that actually resonates.
And if you ever forget, stick a Post-It note on your monitor: “The customer doesn’t give a shit.”