ThinkingSparks

Leave before the gospel

According to the Church of the Customer ‘positioning is a marketing facade that paints a picture idealized by the marketer, not necessarily the customer’. The power of customer evangelism is, according to the author, many times greater then anything dreamed up by marketers.

They use OwenBloggers.com to illustrate their point. Students at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management found themselves enrolled in a better school than they had expected. They decided they could promote their school better than the marketers of the school itself and started a weblog.

Reading the post of the Church of the Customer I wonder about several things:

• Isn’t customer evangelism simply an extreme form of word of mouth where Web 2.0 makes creates possibilities that customers didn’t have before?
• Isn’t the Vanderbilt example just an example of poor positioning, poor marketing, and poor management of expectations?
• If there is no positioning or no marketing, how does the customer know that there is something to evangelize?

To me positioning is making a choice of what and where you want to be. And subsequently as an organization you give everything within your power to get there. When you do it right, your customers join you and help you reach your goals. Customer evangelists then sing the gospel of your brand and praise the dreams of the marketer. When you poorly execute the positioning, your choir of evangelist will have left before the gospel.

(Post in Dutch)

Authenticity by consumer demand?

In response to my post if creating shareholder value excludes authenticity, Tom Asacker, wonders if consumers care one way or the other if companies are authentic or not. Seth Godin writes:

Consumers are begging to be sold on the authentic. The easiest way to do that, of course, is to be authentic. And yet, ever since they replaced the sugar in Coke with corn syrup, who knows any more... Being inauthentic is tricky, unpredictable and often wrong. But it also works.

The fact is, most of the people want to be fooled, just about all of the time.

I question Seth on a number of points:

1. Either consumers want authentic or they want to be fooled. Which one is it?
2. Which fact proves that people want to be fooled? I would really like to know.
3. I personally hate being fooled or being treated like a fool. So I do not understand the statement that most people want to be fooled most of the time. Is that a conscious choice? In some situations? Sometimes? Or an unconscious acceptance that being fooled is just a fact of life? As long as a person doesn’t know that he is being fooled, ignorance is bliss? It must be, because knowing that you are fooled makes you feel like a fool. I think consumers don’t want to have that feeling. It is the feeling that someone has gotten the better of you..
4. Maybe it is the wish of the consumer to be fooled that has driven businesses to the lack of authenticity? I don’t think this is congruent with the power that business has or the lack of power consumer may feel.
5. Authenticity by consumer demand, claims Seth Godin, Asacker wonders if consumers care one way or the other. I think they do not necessarily explicitly care about authenticity, but they care about the consequences of businesses not being authentic. These consequences can be bad, like: Organizations not living up to their promise, Poor service, Poor products, Crappy apologies when something does go wrong,  Poor leadership, Phoney corporate social responsibility, Weak brands. Weak non-performing organizational cultures,  Enron, Ahold. The list can go on and on………..So while consumers may not demand authenticity per se, they demand the outcome of authenticity. Especially if experience is what a company sells to its customers. Fellow customers are part of the experience and authenticity is needed to pick the customers that both enjoy and enhance the experience.
6. Being authentic isn’t easy and becomes more difficult with the number of employees in an organization, number of different geographical locations of the organization, number of business units etc. etc. Besides, if it was easy to be authentic, we would not be discussing it now. Authenticity would then be a given.
7. Authenticity to me is a component of Corporate Social Responsibility. The latter is not possible without the first. Surely, Seth Godin doesn’t preach corporate social unresponsibility or suggest that consumers would want that that type of behavior from business?

I think authenticity is important, but it is also a very difficult concept to reconcile with the way business has been done.

Insincere apologies vs. authentic rudeness

After I lived in the USA and came back to Holland I was shocked to see how horribly some Dutch companies treated their customers. Be it in a store, bar, restaurant or call center. Of course this doesn’t apply to everyone and I think things have become better over the years. Although I still can be in utter amazement about the way customers are sometimes treated. See my post on Vodafone. I still enjoy visiting the USA, where I can bask in the service and attention I receive at so many places of business.

Maybe it is a cultural thing. Americans know how to give good service (by nature?) and the Dutch don’t. Of course when you say that to a Dutch person most likely the reply will be that Americans are fake. This prejudice seems to be solely based on the American way of greeting people: How are you? Many Dutch for some reason think this is insincere and shallow and hence the label fake. Unjustly so in my opinion.

We Dutch can learn something from the Americans when it comes to giving good customer service. Seth Godin wrote about the cheapest form of good customer service: the apology. In his post he questions the sincerity of the apology. The example he gives is great. It prefer sincerety and authenticity. I however accept insincere apologies above authentic rudeness any day!

Incommunicado

I had a problem with some software and looking on the website of the company on how to get in touch with them, I noted something curious.

1. The organization does not give an e-mail address where they can be reached.
2. The organization has a support form where customers can file their questions.
3. Below the link to the support form there is an additional sentence that states that if people use the form for questions to management, publishing, the webmaster or sales that these questions will not be forwarded and/or answered.

In this time where everyone wants a dialog with their customer this company wants none of that. They rather be incommunicado.