Serving Need, Not Greed: How Business Can Partner With Customers

by Sharon Drew Morgen
Published in At Work magazine, June 1998

In a small village in Senegal, there's recently been a new lease on life: the government has issued women a three-foot-long metal cylinder with round metal ends and a long metal roller-handle to hold and carry water from the river.

No longer must they travel back and forth for water each day, over and over again, with heavy pottery jars on their heads. They can now fill a cylinder and have enough water for two days! This saves them hours a day, time they can now spend with their children, sewing clothes, creating a new business, or just being social.

A materialistic, consumer-oriented approach to this problem would have been to sell containers made from less durable products, such as plastic. These would need to be replaced regularly, leave material that would be difficult to dispose of, and harm natural resources. By contrast, the metal containers represent true progress -- a solution that honors the environment, helps the local economy, and makes the manufacturer and distributor money. This product was created to serve; it is an outgrowth of the needs of the people. It nonetheless generates revenue, and people earn money manufacturing it. Like many new products, it is also changing a culture -- but unlike most, it is person-inspired rather than marketing-inspired.

I believe that we could continue to flourish socially and economically if we created only those products that people needed. Indeed, I consider this an imperative. We can no longer accept materialism and consumerism and greed as the foundation of business, with exploiting the earth and its peoples as the result.

Before the advent of money, the exchange of goods involved face-to-face bartering for goods deemed necessary. Money, however, set the stage for business to become an abstract affair. The farmer who once bartered corn for a shovel now must sell his corn to a distributor and travel to the store to purchase a shovel.

Commerce became even more impersonal when companies began to use mass media to promote and introduce their products. The farmer who needed a shovel became everyone who might need a shovel. Varieties of shovels began to be featured in mail-order catalogues, then in ads in newspapers and magazines and on television and the Internet. The shovel exchanged for a bushel of corn became many shovels for many types of jobs exchanged for money between strangers. What was once a personal connection has become an impersonal transaction.

Now, under our system of capitalist enterprise, business pretty much decides what products get made and what resources will be used to manufacture them. Entire companies are based on the products and services the principals and their R&D teams decide to create, believing that if something can be made, it can be sold. The question of "need" is not a primary factor; marketing's job is to get a company's wares sold by creating desire for them. In essence, we have gone from creating goods to support human survival to surviving in order to create-and buy-goods.

CREATIVITY IN SERVICE OF NEED

This leaves us in a precarious position. Sure, our markets are booming, and technological innovation continues at mind-boggling rates. But we are using up our natural resources, polluting the planet on an unprecedented and perhaps irretrievable scale, destroying ways of life that have sustained communities worldwide for hundreds of years, and seeing a widening gap between the rich and the poor everywhere. So what do we do?

The answer, I believe, lies in reconfiguring the aims and means of doing business. We need to focus on creating products people need rather than on having our R&D and marketing teams invent needs. And we need to find a way to temper need with our awareness of the limits posed by working within a framework of sustainability.

We can achieve this by basing our actions on serving rather than manipulation, and by adopting a collaborative, rather than authoritarian, approach to product development. I will describe how this can work at the level where most business transactions occur: salespeople interacting with prospective customers. Because there is no company or service-supplier that operates without some form of sales, this business function can serve as both pragmatic illustration and model of what can be done to support the emergence of business based on need rather than greed.

As intermediaries between companies and consumers, salespeople are in a prime position to facilitate a key collaborative relationship: that of company and consumer. They can serve prospective customers by asking the questions that help them delineate their needs in ways consistent with their values, and they can serve their companies by bringing the answers in-house. Then the seller (and company) can decide to fill customers' needs or not.

Certainly, many companies understand the need to bring customers, employees, and the public into their decision-making processes. They conduct surveys, form focus groups, hold meetings with customer groups, and even observe consumer behavior in order to discern people's needs and wants. But such marketing research is typically driven by a company's need to create and sell a product idea, not by the consumer's expression of unmet need. It fails to engage the seller and consumer in the truly collaborative process of unearthing unfulfilled needs or wishes and envisioning how they might be met.

To provide companies with information on needs for new products and services, sellers need to ask questions that will lead a person through a search to find out "what's missing" and how that gap might be filled. The questions should first elicit an appraisal of the current situation, and then explore what might be missing to make the situation better. If unmet needs are revealed through this process, the seller should frame questions that help the person to conceive of the product or service that would meet those needs and also be consistent with the buyer's values.

Through this process, the seller and consumer will become partners in a deep quest for answers. No longer will sellers be serving their company's interests; they will be serving the consumer's interests. This is illustrated by the following series of questions a seller might ask:

• How is your business currently running? Is there anything missing for:
  • people to be happier or more productive?
  • the organization to be running more effectively?
  • your customers to be happier?
  • your product/resource use to be more efficient?
  • greater conservation of natural resources?
• How would you use the resources you have at hand to respond to any gaps you've identified?
• How would you systematically assess your operations to determine whether you have any unmet needs?
• At what point would you seek outside support to help address these unmet needs?

If you decide to seek outside support to develop a new product or service, what criteria would you use to decide the functions it would perform? How would you choose a partner for co-creating it?

Once there are answers to the questions, sellers would inform their company of what they've learned: what seems to be a missing product or service, what criteria need to be met to fulfill the consumer's needs, and how the consumer and company might work together. From there, a decision team might meet and set in motion the process of creating a range of possible products to send out to the customer base for further discussion.

WHO DEFINES NEED?

The collaborative approach to product creation that I advocate highlights a fundamental assumption concerning business: that companies should make our product decisions for us. How would our world change if consumers made the decisions in conjunction with the corporation?

The larger question I'm looking at here is Who defines need? In the example of the farmer and the shovel, it was a two-way decision: the farmer needed the shovel, the blacksmith needed the corn. We can go back to that model by helping consumers discover what they need before we create any new products: if we produce farming tools, we can ask people to dream of the types of implements they would like in order to work their lands most sustainably. We would be creating products for people, not seeking people for the products we create.

Matters are complicated at this point in history, however, by our need to end unsustainable consumption. No longer can we necessarily equate wishes with needs; criteria that may cause wishes to be balanced against the constraints posed by our precarious global system need to be brought into play. This means inviting involvement from all parties with a stake in the outcomes of a business's operations. The question/ answer framework remains the same; the number of stakeholders involved merely grows.

Of course, it isn't as simple as that: decision making will involve weighing even more factors than are now considered. And it will take a huge cultural shift to redefine the role of seller as servant. At the same time, there is the opportunity to benefit from the collaboration inherent in this approach to doing business. No one person or group would have the answers; these would emerge from the collective thinking. Power would be held by all the stakeholders in equal measure; leadership would mean holding the space for answers to emerge. Each person's need -- whether it be a corporate need, a communication need, an unfilled personal desire -- would be defined, explored, and fulfilled through the decision-making power of the whole.

No longer would we each be dependent on others to define how we live; we would all have a stake in the definition. Not everyone would want that option at first, but eventually it would be de rigueur, just as now we expect our corporations to provide us with a ready-made menu of products and services, define our job opportunities, and assure us that their success determines our success.

We have to learn to trust each other, listen to each other, and take responsibility for each other's decisions. Then maybe we could go to sleep nights knowing there would still be a planet on which our great grandchildren could grow corn and use their shovels.