Marketing Insights From a to Z: 80 Concepts Every Manager Needs to Know

“to create a customer. Therefore the business has two—
and only two—basic functions: marketing and innovation. Mar-
keting and innovation produce results: all the rest are costs.”
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L. L. Bean, the outdoor mail order firm, wholeheartedly prac-
tices a customer-oriented credo: 
“A customer is the most impor-
tant visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us—we are
dependent on him. He is not an outsider in our business—he is a
part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him . . . he is
doing us a favor by giving us the opportunity to do so.”
Products come and go. A company’s challenge is to hold on to
its customers longer than it holds on to its products. It needs to
watch the 
market life cycle
and the 
customer life cycle
more than the
product life cycle
. Someone at Ford realized this: