Marketing
What is customer-ing?
It's the word we use for a discipline that keeps getting skipped: starting with the people you serve, listening before you build, and letting what you hear shape every decision that follows. Here's the definition, where the word comes from, and how to run it yourself — whether you ever hire us or not.
Customer-ing
verb, /ˈkʌs.tə.mər.ɪŋ/The practice of starting every marketing decision with the people you serve — listening to customers in their own words first, then letting what you learn direct the brand, the website, the pricing, the strategy, and the plans.
It's a verb on purpose. Marketing needed one again: something you do, continuously, with customers — not something you do to them. The idea isn't new either; it descends from voice-of-customer research, jobs-to-be-done, and plain old talking to people.
Where the word comes from
Take the -ing off and see what's left.
Marketing is a verb. Like walking — something you do, continuously, or don't do at all. Somewhere along the way it stopped sounding like one. Ask a room of business owners what marketing is and you'll hear advertising, promotion, social posts, campaigns, the department down the hall. All nouns. So, in workshops, we take the word apart on the whiteboard.
marketing
What everyone answers: advertising, promotion, a department.
market
Strip the -ing. Ask again and the answers change completely — a place where people come to buy and sell. Nobody says advertising.
customer
The one-word synonym for a market. Everyone in the room already knows exactly what this means.
customer-ing
Put the -ing back. There's the verb marketing was supposed to be all along.
That's the whole exercise, and it lands every time — because nobody has to be taught what a customer is.
Marketing, properly, is understanding, creating, communicating, and delivering real value to real people. That definition has a person in it. When the word came to mean the output instead, the person fell out.
Customer-ing puts them back. It isn't a phase you complete or a line on an org chart — it's the ongoing work of knowing and serving your customers, which is the whole of marketing in a business rather than one campaign inside it.
We're not the first to reach for the word — it turns up elsewhere in marketing writing, used to the same end. We arrived at it in a classroom, kept it because it worked, and it's been how we talk about marketing ever since.
How it works
Four moves, in that order.
Customer-ing is the first move — and the reason the other three land. Skip it and you're guessing expensively.
01
Listen
Voice of customer, first. Interviews, conversations, reviews, support threads, and the patterns in how people already talk about you. Ask, don't assume.
02
Align
Turn what you heard into what it means, then match it against where you want the business to go. Findings without direction are just quotes.
03
Act
Now build — strategy, brand, website, pricing, campaign, whatever the findings call for. Built on evidence, it lands the first time more often than not.
04
Teach
Show the work. Why each call was made, what was learned, how to run it again. The point is that you can do it without us next time.
Let's be precise —
What customer-ing is not.
The word is easy to nod along to and easy to fake. Four things it specifically isn't:
Not a survey.
Surveys are good at confirming what you already suspect and bad at telling you what you never thought to ask. Customer-ing starts with open conversation, where the surprise lives, and uses surveys later to size what you found.
Not a persona workshop.
A room full of your own people inventing “Marketing Mary” is your assumptions, formatted. If the customer isn't in the room or on the recording, it isn't customer-ing.
Not validation for a decision you already made.
Research run after the direction is set is theater with a budget line. The test is simple: could what you hear this week actually change what you ship next month? If not, you're not listening — you're collecting.
Not a phase you finish.
It's a verb. Customers move, markets move, and the words people use for their own problems move fastest of all. The listening is a habit, not a milestone.
Do it yourself
Five questions. Five customers. This week.
You don't need a budget or a research firm to start. You need five conversations, twenty minutes each, and the discipline to write down what people say instead of what you hoped they'd say.
01
What were you trying to get done when you found us?
02
What did you try before this? Why did you stop?
03
What almost stopped you from choosing us?
04
What would have to be true for this to be obviously worth it?
05
If you were explaining us to someone like you, what would you say?
Record them if people are willing. Keep the exact words — the phrasing your customers use is the phrasing that belongs on your website, in your emails, and in the way you describe yourself. Then look for the thing you hear three times. That's not an anecdote anymore; that's your next piece of work.
In practice
What it changes when you actually do it.
Three times listening first sent the work somewhere we wouldn't have gone on our own.
It reframed the whole website.
Listening to how patients actually search for a urologist told us nobody does it at 2pm on a Tuesday — they do it at 11pm, alone, typing a question they haven't said out loud. What they need first isn't a credential. It's a person who seems safe to ask. That one finding shaped the entire site.
Read the story
The internet knew the practice. It didn't know him.
It rebuilt a class.
We survey after every teaching session and rebuild from what comes back. A pricing workshop for first-time business owners got reshaped by its own students — and got invited back season after season because of it.
Read the story
The class that listens back.
It preceded the rebrand.
Customer and stakeholder work came before a word of the new brand was written. As the CEO put it: he “resists quick fixes… did the customer and stakeholder work, then helped us rebrand and become more consistent in everything we said.”
Read the story
Rooted and renewed.
It's the first thing in every engagement.
Brand, website, hosting, teaching, partnership — the service changes, the order of operations doesn't. Customer-ing is move one, every time, which is why the First 90 Days is built around it.
See how we work
Questions, answered.
▸Is customer-ing just market research?
It overlaps, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. The difference is where it sits: market research is usually a project you commission, delivered as a report. Customer-ing is a standing habit that owns the first move of every piece of work — and it's finished only when something actually changed because of what you heard.
▸How many customers do I need to talk to?
▸Isn't this the same as jobs-to-be-done?
▸What if I don't have customers yet?
▸Who does this work — us or you?
Where to begin
Ninety days of customer-ing.
Most clients start with the First 90 Days: real listening, a clear read on the people you serve, a defined direction, and one meaningful thing built or fixed. Everything after it stands on that.