The first step in marketing

Often we are told that the first step to building a solid business plan is to develop a future vision for your organization, and mission and values.  Perhaps!  But knowing what YOU want to achieve does not move you forward very effectively in terms of what your customers or members need and expect.  A better question than, "What do we want to do", might be "Which needs (of our customer) can we best fulfil".  To answer the former, we need to look inwards and understand our organization's capabilities.  However, to answer the latter we must understand our customer's needs intimately.  Armed with this information our introspection takes on more purpose and value and determining which of our capabilities will best deliver on the customers' expectations becomes a much more efficient process.   Conducting extensive research on existing customer is, in my opinion,  much more useful than corporate navel gazing in a vacuum.