Life & Wisdom Quote by Orison Swett Marden

A century before "customer-centric" became a corporate mantra, Orison Swett Marden sells empathy as both ethics and strategy. Calling it a "golden rule" is the tell: he borrows the moral authority of religious teaching and repackages it for the marketplace, where virtue can be audited in repeat purchases. The line is blunt, almost preacher-simple, because Marden is writing for the strivers of early American capitalism, an audience hungry for rules that promise order in a fast-expanding, often impersonal economy.

"Put yourself in your customer's place" isn’t just a plea to be nice. It’s a method for reducing uncertainty. If you can imagine the customer's irritation, pride, budget anxiety, or desire for status, you can design the product, the pitch, the return policy, even the tone of the encounter. Empathy becomes market research before market research had a department.

The subtext is harder-edged: the customer's inner life is a tool. Marden’s optimism-era self-help tradition (the same cultural current that later feeds Dale Carnegie) treats character as a form of capital. Your moral posture is not separate from profit; it is profit’s most reliable engine. That fusion is why the quote still lands: it flatters businesspeople with the idea that decency is efficient, while quietly warning that indifference is expensive.

In an age of monopolies, mail-order catalogs, and rising consumer consciousness, Marden’s rule is also a legitimacy project: if business can learn to simulate the customer's perspective, it can justify itself as service rather than extraction.