In the Maturation stage—in essence, the growth stage—the most important factor is the order of priorities. Many ventures hope to make an impact first and receive a response afterward. Yet the right approach is always to use the response as your starting point, before pursuing impact. This is fundamentally about taking the pulse of your market.
The reason we say “response before impact” is to minimize error. Testing an advertisement with audiences before committing your entire marketing budget to it, showing a product to sample groups and gathering feedback before launching it, or observing your audience before trying to release a song as your next hit single will improve both your efficiency and your ability to scale success over the long term. Success depends as critically on your target audience’s response as it does on you. Recognizing this does not diminish your originality or your strength. It gives you a more realistic perspective and helps you reach success faster.
There are, of course, exceptions. When Steve Jobs told Kevin O’Leary that he “did not care what students, teachers, or the public wanted; what mattered was what he wanted,” he was prioritizing impact over response. But at that point, his product was revolutionary and setting trends. When introducing their first product, the Apple I, he too had prioritized response. They first presented it at the Homebrew Computer Club, kept the price low, and took the pulse of the market. This pattern holds in almost every case.
Impact can take priority only once you have the momentum of an audience’s response behind you.
So what does this look like in the real world?
Let’s start with fashion. Zara, Inditex’s flagship brand, does not produce an entire collection in one go at the beginning of a season. It produces small batches of each design, sends them to stores, and listens to what the shelves are saying. Sales data and customer feedback determine which styles will be produced again and which will quietly be withdrawn. While competitors produce based on forecasts, Zara produces based on response. Large volumes—the impact—come only after the shelves have spoken.
In technology, Dropbox offers the clearest example. In 2007, Drew Houston did not have a working product, because building the infrastructure for file synchronization would take months. Instead, Houston made a three-minute demo video showing how the product would work and shared it on Digg. The waiting list grew from 5,000 to 75,000 people overnight. Before a single line of production code was complete, he had already taken the pulse of demand.
The same logic applies to the arts. Before signing with a record label, Ed Sheeran spent years performing at small venues and selling his own EPs himself. Every night, he read the audience’s response in real time: which songs made the room fall silent and which made people sing along. When he approached a major record label, he brought a repertoire that had been tested repeatedly, rather than a prediction.
In the beauty industry, there is Emily Weiss’s story. Before founding Glossier, Weiss launched a blog called Into the Gloss in 2010. There was no product to sell, but every day, readers’ comments revealed more about what was missing and what different skin types needed. When she launched the brand with four products in 2014, those products were an answer to an audience she had listened to for years, rather than ideas dreamed up in a meeting room. First, she built an audience. Then, she made what that audience wanted.
The other side of the coin is far more expensive.
Amazon introduced the Fire Phone with a major launch in 2014. Its 3D visual effects and camera-based product recognition features were designed to make a world-changing impact. But whether customers actually wanted them had not been tested before the launch. The product was pulled from shelves roughly a year later, and Amazon recorded a write-down of approximately $170 million.
In October 2010, Gap replaced its familiar blue-square logo, recognized for decades, with a simple wordmark overnight. It did not ask its customers or test the change with an audience. The backlash on social media was so strong that the brand soon reverted to its old logo. The price of this mistake was trust, rather than money. By disrupting its own identity, the brand discovered just how attached its audience was to it.
In 2014, U2 and Apple automatically added the new album Songs of Innocence to approximately 500 million iTunes accounts. The impact was enormous, but nobody had asked the listeners. Many users saw it as an intrusion rather than a gift. Within days, Apple had to release a separate tool to remove the album, and Bono later apologized. Ed Sheeran had grown by listening to his audience, one live performance at a time. U2 learned by giving its audience something without permission.
In retail, the most painful example is Target Canada. Target entered Canada in 2013 and opened more than 130 stores in a very short period. Before taking the pulse of the market, and before its supply chain was ready, it wanted to make a major impact immediately. Customers encountered empty shelves and prices higher than those in the United States. Their response was silence: people did not come. In early 2015, Target withdrew from Canada entirely. The lesson Zara learned through small batches, Target learned through the cost of a massive rollout.
All eight stories share the same lesson: waiting for a response does not slow you down. It accelerates you. Because momentum builds only when you know where you are going. When impact follows response, it creates momentum. When it comes first, it is a gamble.
