Because most purchase decisions made by people are irrational.

Most organizations crave for diversity in their employee profiles because people with different backgrounds bring in different perspectives. When a team with a diverse set of people are presented with an open-ended problem (nearly all vital problems that an organization has to address to stay afloat and trudge forward are open-ended), it is highly likely that each one will bring her own perspective in addressing the problem.

Yet, while deciding on how to present advertisements, how to design product features, we still try to think in a rational way by understanding what need the product is solving or the advertisement is claiming that the product will solve and use that understanding to design the features that define the product or the advertisement.

Over the last one month, I have been involved in designing the User Experience (UX) for our product and that has been a very revealing experience. The traditional way to go about it is to put ourselves in the skin of the customer and decipher what she would like to see in the product. The actual design will reflect that understanding. But when putting ourselves in the customer's skin, the time has come to ask 'which' customer's skin?

While organizations understand and appreciate diversity in their own employees, they actively disregard diversity in the customer base for their products. Until recently, this was acceptable because it was not practical to understand the background and the expectations of the customer base. It was good enough to think rationally by entering an 'average' customer's skin and deciding product features. But no longer.

It is now possible to understand all the quirks and the seemingly irrational behaviour of our customer base. It is only rational that we go ahead and obtain this knowledge. And then make use of it to customize our offerings to exceed the expectations of every customer. Not just the average customer.