You Don’t Get It!

I recently had a meeting with a couple people from a company (that shall remain nameless) and we were discussing target consumer.  It occurred to me after a bit of discussion that these guys really, truly believe they know who their customer is and how to communicate to them, but the entire time I’m thinking “NO!  YOU SO DON’T GET IT!  You are totally missing your customer base!”  Now granted, who’s to say I’m right?  But I couldn’t help but be frustrated because I think they are so missing it and they have no idea.

But before you think I’m just a pompous ‘know-it-all’, I have been those guys.  A few years ago I worked at a company where we really believed we had it figured out.  We were #1 in our industry and had experienced a lot of success.  We thought we were the experts on reaching our customer and that we knew everything about how to market our product.  It was only after being removed from that industry for 6 months or so that I discovered we were completely ignoring a MASSIVE segment of our potential market.   Boy, did I feel like an ignorant, young punk!

So today it has me thinking… how will I know when/if I’m out of touch again?  Who is going to look me in the eyes and say “you are missing it!”?  In my former job, we were talking about a product that I was marketing, but in my current job we’re talking about people’s lives and eternity.  How dare I think I’ve got it all figured out and think I know how to best reach people for Christ.  How can I be sure that we’re doing absolutely everything we can to reach people who are far from God?

God, please protect me from thinking that we have found the perfect solution for ‘doing church’.

I guess the day that I think we’ve ‘arrived’ is probably the day that we are really so out of touch!  What do you think?