When was the last time you put yourself in customers' shoes and tried your own product or service? When did you last visit one of your retailers? Or perhaps tried to buy one of your products through your website? Surprisingly few marketers do so (even infrequently) and in the process lose valuable insight as to what it is to be a consumer of their brands.
Genchi Genbutsu was a maxim adopted by a mildly successful little company called
Toyota. Translated from the Japanese it basically means "Go and see for yourself". It teaches that there is no substitute for personal experience and rather than relying on the opinion of others, we should seek to fully experience the object of our interest. So that means getting out there and trying it. It also means trying out what the competition has to offer.
The world is full of secondary information - especially online. We can easily become cocooned in a comfy misapprehension that we're well informed about what's going on out there.
So here's a challenge. Next time you buy something, get the opinion of an expert who's tried it out first: you.
