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In his influential book, The Practice of Management, Peter Drucker, “the Father of Modern Management,” presented and answered a series of simple, straightforward questions. He asked, “What is a business?” The most common answer, “An organization to make a profit,” is not only false, but it is also irrelevant to Drucker. “There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer,” Drucker wrote.

Drucker pointed out that businesses create markets for products and services: “There may have been no want at all until business action created it – by advertising, by salesmanship, or by inventing something new. In every case it is a business action that creates a customer.” Furthermore, he said, “What a business thinks it produces is not of first importance – especially not to the future of the business and to its success.” “What the customer thinks he is buying, what he considers ‘value,’ is decisive – it determines what a business is, what it produces and whether it will prosper.” Finally, Drucker said, “Because it is its purpose to create a customer, any business enterprise has two – and only these two – basic functions: marketing and innovation.”⁵

Notice that Drucker did not mention production, suppliers, or distribution, but only customers. That is what marketing is – a customer‐focused business approach.

A production‐focused business first produces goods and then tries to sell them. In the book Marketing 3.0: From Products to Customers to Human Spirit, Philip Kotler and his two co‐authors refer to a product‐focused approach as Marketing 1.0.⁶ A customer‐focused business approach produces goods or services that it knows will sell based on market research and data that reveal customers’ aspirations, wants, needs, tastes, and preferences. In Marketing 4.0: Moving from Traditional to Digital, Kotler, who is often referred to as “the father of modern marketing,” and his co‐authors refer to a customer‐focused approach as Marketing 2.0.⁷ In Chapter 15: Marketing and Chapter 16: Advertising, you will learn more about how marketing has further changed from Marketing 1.0 (product focused), to Marketing 2.0 (customer focused), to Marketing 3.0 (human centricity), and to Marketing 4.0 (customer collaboration), but for now, we will concentrate on customer‐focused Marketing 2.0.

Another leading theorist, former Harvard Business School Professor Theodore Levitt, wrote an article in 1960 titled “Marketing myopia” that is perhaps the most influential single article on marketing ever published. Levitt claims that the railroads went out of business “not because the need [for passenger and freight transportation] was filled by others … but because it was not filled by the railroads themselves. They let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business.”⁸ In other words, the railroads failed because they did not know how to create and keep customers; they were not marketing‐oriented. Where would makers of buggy whips be today if they had decided they were in the vehicle acceleration business or in the transportation accessory business instead of being in the buggy whip business?

As a result of the customer‐focused, marketing approach espoused by Drucker, Levitt and other leading management and marketing theorists, in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s many companies asked themselves the question, “What business are we in?” and subsequently changed their direction to focus more on marketing and customers rather than on products. After the Internet became widely adopted by consumers in the late 1990s, entrepreneurs such as Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Google), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), and Jeff Bezos (Amazon) asked “What business do our customers want us to be in?”. Existing businesses that survived after the Internet disruption had a heightened sensitivity to customers and changed the old‐fashioned outlook of, “Let’s produce this product because we’ve discovered how to make it.” The Internet opened the door to a new digital age in human history, and from a business perspective, successful businesses and entrepreneurs in the digital age put the preferences, wants, and needs of customers and consumers first as these customer‐first businesses shot past traditional companies in market value.

In today’s digital‐age economy consumers rule because the availability of information on the web has switched the information asymmetry that existed in favor of marketers prior to the Internet to be in favor of consumers in the post‐Internet, digital era. Before the Internet and search, someone who wanted to buy a car had to depend on car dealers and their salespeople to provide information about a car’s features, benefits, condition, and price. The information asymmetry favored the salesperson.

Today, consumers can search for the information about the make, model, features, benefits, condition, and price of a car on the Internet and can be armed with thorough information before walking into a dealership, often with more information than a dealer salesperson has. Therefore the information asymmetry has switched to the consumer in the digital era. Any company that does not recognize that customers now rule and put them on a pedestal, wow them, and delight them with an excellent experience will disappear from the business landscape.⁹