Quality in a service or a product is not what you put into it. It’s what the client or the customer gets out of it. Peter Drucker.

It’s an age old adage, but true. Regardless of the tools we use to build a business, without customers there wouldn’t be one. I was thinking about that last evening when I wandered into a Starbucks, just before they were closing.

I stared into the display case looking for something sweet. The selection was seriously depleted. About the only left was a lonely looking oatmeal cookie – with a big “bite” taken out of one side but it looked good and I was hungry.

“Would you like something with your tea?” the barista pleasantly inquired.

“Yes,” I replied, “I’ll take that oatmeal cookie – the one that a mouse has obviously attacked.” We both laughed.

She took the cookie out of the display case and, as she was swiping my card, she said announced, with a grin, “The cookie’s on us.”

“No, no, no,” it’s OK,” I said, “I was just joking.”

“I know,” she replied. “It’s still on us.”

Hmmm… I thought. Here we are. Tweeting, liking and blogging, updating our web presence… trying so hard to be cool, scrambling for our fair share of the market.

But it’s not always only about the technology. How much could that cookie have actually cost? At the end of the day, growing a business is always about people, even in the age of laptops, tablets and smartphones.

Getting customers isn’t easy. Keeping them is even harder.

In a hard scrabble market place, the leaders know takes sometimes nothing sticks as well as a free cookie and a simple human gesture.