Listening to the wrong customer is a strategy, and it fails every time

Shake Shack once replaced its crinkle-cut fries with fresh-cut fries. The decision was not driven by what core customers wanted. It was driven by what New York cultural critics wanted, and the results were uniformly bad.

Seth Godin, who recounts the episode, describes the logic Danny Meyer’s team was following: status from critics who would certify the brand as authentic. The fries that resulted were, by Godin’s account, no good. The internet registered its objection loudly. Staff hated making them, and operational complexity followed. “Nothing good came of this shift,” Godin says, “except making a couple people in New York City happy, because that’s who they decided to listen to.” Meyer eventually stepped back and asked a sharper question about what the fries were actually for. The answer pointed unambiguously back to the core customer. Crinkle-cut fries returned. Profits and productivity rose.

The same failure mode appears in sales. Sam Parr, who previously ran a company that generated revenue through advertising, describes closing seven-figure deals and initially pitching pure return on investment logic: spend this much, make this much. The pitch never worked. What worked was relationship-building and, critically, framing the spend as safe, budget-approved, and low-risk. The buyers Parr was selling to were not operating on founder logic. They were operating on budget-safety logic. Pitching return on investment to an audience motivated by something else entirely was a structural mismatch, and the closed deals came only after Parr recognized which reasoning his actual buyers were using.

Nothing good came of this shift, except making a couple people in New York City happy, because that's who they decided to listen to. Seth Godin

Greg Isenberg encountered the mismatch in demographic terms. Working with facilitator.com, Isenberg found that the most valuable customers turned out to be over 45 years old, a finding that contradicted whatever assumptions had been shaping the business’s orientation. The demographic the business had implicitly been building toward was not the demographic generating the most value.

Across these three cases, the pattern is consistent. A company, a sales team, or a platform orients itself around an audience that feels important, credible, or strategically appealing, and performance degrades accordingly. The critics who validate the brand are not the customers who eat the fries. The buyers in a seven-figure advertising negotiation are not the rational economic actors a founder might assume. The users generating the most value may be a decade or two older than the assumed target. In each case, correcting the misalignment restored performance.

The mechanism behind these failures is not negligence. It is the reasonable-sounding decision to listen to the most audible voices, whether those voices belong to critics, to assumed demographics, or to rational-buyer archetypes that do not describe the actual room. Vocal audiences generate feedback. Feedback creates the impression of signal. But feedback from a non-core segment is noise dressed as signal, and product decisions built on it tend to compound the misalignment rather than correct it.

Meyer’s question about the purpose of the fries is the right diagnostic tool, regardless of industry. It forces a distinction between what a product does for the people it is ostensibly designed to serve and what it signals to the people a company might want to impress. Those are often different audiences with different incentives, and the business case belongs to one of them.