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I have had three successful bricks-and-mortar businesses. All of them were customer driven and I strongly believe that is primarily why they were successful.
Obviously that is not the only way to do business, but in the long run it is almost always the best way to do business. It is also usually much easier to sell what people actually want, than to have to convince them to accept a substitute. You can fool some of the people... etc...
And in my experience, businesses which treat their customers badly are nearly always poorly run. Without customers driving standards and forcing constant change and improvement, management becomes complacent and inefficient.
But, and it is a big but, there are far more businesses which claim to be customer driven, but are not, than businesses which are too short-sighted and unambitious to understand the sense of putting their customers first. To paraphrase Tom Peters, co-author of "In Search of Excellence", there is a world of difference between companies which exist by their slogans and companies which only use slogans to paper their walls.
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