I worked with a major consumer product goods company once that insisted that a particular product it offered was to be marketed to men. New to the fold and not afraid to ask the obvious question, I said, “Why not women?”

All the market research in the world told them women didn’t like their product. All my personal experience told me they never asked an important audience: women.

It’s easy to assume we know our audiences. It’s easy to take the charts and graphs the big research companies give us and say, “Okay, we know who to target. We know what they want.”