To market effectively, you have to see thing through your customer's eyes, not the other way around.
Glasses are not one-size-fits-all 
Picture this scenario: you have difficulty seeing things clearly, so you go to an optometrist. You expect to have your eyes checked and to read off charts with different lenses.
But that doesn't happen. Instead, the optometrist just takes the glasses she is wearing off her own face and tells you: "This make everything clear for me. They should work for you, too."
Say what? What optometrist assumes that anyone who comes in needs the same exact prescription she has for herself?
That it's completely irrational to project that about eyeglasses is something most people would acknowledge. Yet they ail to see that do just that in business all the time.
Home vs investment
I was thinking abut this week because of a realtor's failure to grasp what I wanted to have in an apartment. She was stuck in her mindset of what believed made a property a good investment.
She kept sending me suggestions with apartments that didn't have the features I wanted, claiming the included parking spots made them desirable. I explained multiple times that parking was not a major priority for me but other features were.
Even after I explained this, she still tried to talk me into an apartment that clearly lacked what I wanted, saying it was a good buy. Perhaps it was a good value, but I want a home to live in with the features that are important to me.
From real estate to theoretical pills
This kind of disconnect is very common in all kinds of businesses in which the sellers fail to see things from the customer's eyes and project their own tastes and values on others. It doesn't occur to them that other people have their own calculus and that features and benefits they go on and on about may not matter to them at all.
In chapter 23 of The Little Prince, we get the perfect illustration of the misalignment between the value proposition of a product and what the customer actually wants in the interaction between the prince and a merchant he meets on his travels: .
"This was a merchant who sold pills that had been invented to quench thirst. You need only swallow one pill a week, and you would feel no need for anything to drink.
"'Why are you selling those?' asked the little prince.
"'Because they save a tremendous amount of time,' said the merchant. "'Computations have been made by experts. With these pills, you save fifty-three minutes in every week.'"
"'And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?'"
"'Anything you like..."
"'As for me,' said the little prince to himself, 'if I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water.'”
Think about it: are you selling someone on the assumption that they'd rather save time than enjoy their water and the walk it takes to get it? Are you pushing your eyeglass prescription on someone without determining what type of corrective lenses she needs for her vision?
You may be doing it in other ways like by promising AI automation that summarizes every book for you. But what if your potential customer enjoys reading through hundreds of pages of novels to appreciate the narrative style and dialog? Not everyone dismisses lengthy prose with TL:DR.
Assuming that everyone shares your priorities when pushing something is not the way to go to show customers you are about them and what they want. You have to drop the projection and really listen.
Related:
Marketing in Uncommon Times
Tech Overload in the Bathroom
A Matter of Degree
Casting the Hero of Your Story
