Why "You're Not the Customer" misses the real problem

Another day, another LinkedIn post reminding marketers that "you are not the customer."

As if they don't already know.

This line, often delivered with the air of hard-won wisdom, is rarely wrong. But it's also rarely helpful. Most serious marketers aren't confused about who the customer is.

What they're fighting, daily, is a corporate system that doesn't care. Or worse, thinks it cares, while running on processes and incentives designed to keep the customer at arm's length.

The issue isn't ignorance. It's distance.

The distance problem is structural, not personal

As companies grow, a natural drift occurs: leadership attention turns inward, customer proximity fades. Eventually, the people shaping strategy spend more time in internal meetings than in the market. They read dashboards, get filtered updates, approve NPS surveys and mistake that for closeness.

This drift is inevitable at scale. As organizations grow, operational demands pull leadership attention inward toward budget cycles, board meetings, regulatory requirements, investor relations. The further you rise, the more intermediaries filter customer reality.

This isn't just structural. It's cultural.

When the CEO doesn't regularly "leave the building," the company stops being market-oriented—no matter how many times customer obsession appears in the values deck. It becomes a firm designed around internal logic: functional alignment, political territory, risk mitigation.

To borrow from John le Carré:

"A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world."
– The Honorable Schoolboy

Most executive teams are viewing customers from several desks away.

The "you are not the customer" reminder does have its place, particularly for early-career marketers or in consumer goods where demographic distance is extreme. But for seasoned practitioners? They're not the problem. The org chart is.

The marketer's daily reality isn't what you think

Inside that system, marketers are told they're the voice of the customer but then punished when that voice disrupts the roadmap. They are expected to "create demand," communicate value, and build trust with customers whose real needs are inconvenient to internal priorities and timelines.

It's not that marketers forget they're not the customer. It's that no one upstream seems to remember the customer is real people, not numbers on a spreadsheet.

That's the tension. Marketers often find themselves defending basic truths to senior leaders who either (a) already think they understand the market, or (b) don't want their assumptions questioned. Neither posture creates a healthy environment for insight to drive decisions.

Consider the typical flow:

• Customer research surfaces uncomfortable truths about product-market fit, pricing sensitivity, or competitive positioning.
• Marketing packages this into insights.
• Those insights get filtered through product management, sanitized by strategy teams, and presented to leadership as bullet points.
• By the time customer reality reaches decision-makers, it's been abstracted into metrics that feel safely distant from the messy human truths underneath.

We don't need another slide reminding marketers of the basics. They need executives willing to face uncomfortable truths about market reality.

LinkedIn commentary is also disconnected

This is where the LinkedIn and general marketing community commentary gets frustrating.

Too many posts assume marketers are clueless, or that companies are blank slates. That customer-centricity is a knowledge problem, rather than an operating model issue. That if you just repeat "you are not the customer" enough times, good strategy will magically emerge.

But companies are not lectures. They are systems.

You cannot install customer obsession in a firm that was never designed to act on it. You can't remind your way to market orientation. And you certainly can't shame practitioners into fixing a leadership gap.

The real barriers are invisible: political dynamics that reward consensus over insight, risk-aversion that favors incremental improvements over customer-driven pivots, compensation structures that optimize for internal metrics rather than market outcomes. Marketing teams operate within these constraints, not above them.

As someone once said about a different impossible task: One does not simply walk into Mordor. And you don't just declare customer-centricity.

A more useful provocation: executive customer immersion

Here's a more productive intervention than another "back to basics" lecture: organize structured customer immersion for the leadership team.

Not a sales trip. Not a speaking gig. A methodical, ego-free observational tour.

The Framework:

• Block out 2-3 days per quarter for customer contact.
• Visit existing customers in their environment—watch them work, understand their workflows, observe friction points.
• Attend sales meetings for deals that didn't close—not to save them, but to understand why your value proposition didn't resonate.
• Meet with customers who churned or chose competitors—painful but illuminating.
• Sit with frontline customer service teams during their busiest hours.
• Visit prospects in segments you don't serve—understand why they're not in your ICP.

The Rules:

• No pitching. No positioning. Just listening.
• Bring a notebook, not a deck.
• Ask about their day, their frustrations, their alternatives.
• Focus on the gap between what you think you're solving and what they actually need solved.

When you return, ask one diagnostic question:

"Is everything we're doing solving their job to be done? Do our solutions make life better for these people?"

If not, fix that first. It's cheaper than another round of brand refreshes.

This isn't revolutionary. It's basic blocking and tackling. But it's shocking how few leadership teams actually do it consistently. The excuse is always time, but the real barrier is comfort. It's easier to manage customers as abstractions than as complicated humans with messy, inconvenient needs.

For companies that resist formal research programs or dismiss survey data as "just numbers," this approach works because it's visceral. You can't abstract away a frustrated customer sitting across from you explaining why your product creates more problems than it solves.

I recall one CEO to CEO conversation where the customer said they knew when another very specific customer had a "problem." Why we asked? "Because we can't reach your team." The message was received loud and clear.

The real basics are harder

Let's retire the idea that marketers don't understand the basics. Most do. The basics aren't the problem.

The real basics are harder:

• Build a firm that rewards proximity, not just alignment
• Protect those who bring uncomfortable truths
• Close the gap between strategy and reality
• Create systems where customer insight drives decisions, not just informs them

This requires more than marketing competence. It demands organizational courage. It demands the willingness to let customer reality disrupt internal assumptions, timelines, and pet projects.

The companies that get this right don't just talk about customer obsession. They architect it into their operating model. Customer insights don't get filtered through multiple layers: they land directly where decisions get made.

Marketing isn't solely responsible for being the voice of the customer—leadership is responsible for staying close enough to hear it themselves.

Rethinking the default critique

The recurring "you are not the customer" commentary reveals something important: we're diagnosing symptoms, not causes.

When marketers lose touch with customer reality, it's usually because the system around them has lost touch first.

The most customer-centric companies aren't those with the best marketing teams. They're those with leadership teams that refuse to drift. They maintain proximity to the customer. They protect insights that challenge internal logic. They reward people who bring uncomfortable truths about what customers actually want versus what the company wants to build.

If your marketers know the customer better than your executives, that's not a marketing failure. That's a leadership flaw.

Fix the proximity problem, and the basics tend to take care of themselves.