How do companies take a customer for granted? They stop worrying about the customer's needs or what they could do to best appeal to them. Instead they start to focus more of their time on their own needs while assuming that people will keep giving them business like they have in the past.

While this can happen with every form of advertising, I'll use catalog printing for this particular example.

A company who begins to stop caring about their customers will be the ones who don't pay attention to what their customers want in a catalog, or what they're really looking to buy.

Every catalog is going to have certain items that are featured more than others. These are the items that the company gives the most prominence to, and are at the front of the catalogs. They get a larger space on the page in order to give them a better chance of selling.

The question is are you just deciding what items are going to sell and then trying to force them on your customers, or are you actually considering what your customers will like? Are you accepting that they might have other things they prefer, and asking their opinions on what they'd like to see, or basing your future catalog designs off of what worked in the past?

Are you making it easy for people to figure out how to order, or find other contact information, or are you just assuming they'll go to the effort to find it? This last part is very important because I can't tell you how many catalogs I've seen that apparently wanted to hide the way for ordering anything. Talk about the worst thing you could do with your catalog printing, and makes me think the company didn't really care about their customers.

Reach out to your customers and let them know that you still care about them. You might add in special deals with your catalogs to help ensure that they're getting great discounts, which will encourage them to stick around. You're showing that you know they've stuck by you, so you're going to reward them because of it.

All of this goes well beyond just catalog printing into any area of advertising. The second you stop asking yourself whether or not your customers will like what you're doing is the second you start to take for granted that they will.

Every marketing push should begin with that same question. Will your customers like this and will it appeal to them? If you aren't even considering whether or not your customers will like your advertising, than you aren't considering your customers, and they'll be able to tell.