The customer is always...actually rarely right
Waiting to board a flight the other week, I picked up Adam Ferrier’s new book, Stop Listening To The Customer… Try Hearing Your Brand Instead. Over the course of 175 pages, Ferrier picks apart the current obsession with ‘customer-centricity’.
It’s a fascinating read, and I’d encourage you to pick up a copy, but here are the Cliff’s Notes:
- Businesses have become too carried away with customer-centricity, deferring strategy and decision-making (read: our jobs) to research;
- This is a problem because people are notoriously rubbish at communicating their past and current attitudes, and are even worse at predicting their future behaviour;
- The data your business has access to is likely the same that your competitors are using to formulate their strategies, leading to homogenous brands. As a momentary aside, the point about homogeneity was really hammered home at the bookstore -- what’s the deal with all the potty-mouthed book titles at present? Everything is either about not giving a “f*ck” or how to properly give a “sh!t”;
- Exclusively listening to the customer means we’re not focusing on what delivers the greatest value to the company itself - the brand.
Perhaps the paradox of modern marketing is that we know more about marketing science and consumer behaviour than ever before, and yet we’re less empowered to make our own decisions.
That previous statement is no doubt a grand, sweeping generalisation, but hear me out. Three things undergird this point.
First off, research is all too often used for the wrong reasons.
Let me start with a confession: I like research. Really. Just last week, I was running research groups in Parramatta.
But my 15 years of viewing, running and interpreting research has revealed something quite important: research is amazing in the right hands, dangerous in the wrong.
We now know a lot about how irrational humans are (Kahneman, Ariely, Thaler, et al.), yet we still use research (disproportionately so) to evaluate things that we know people are ill-equipped to give their opinions on.
Just consult the texts to see what Ford and Jobs said about asking people what they think.
Next, brands are fungible, so why are we not trying harder to make them distinct?
The work of Byron Sharp has shown us (1) just how substitutable and replaceable our brands are; and (2) building distinctiveness is the best way to inoculate the brand against blending in with its competitors.
But the current reliance on customer-centricity means all companies are essentially accessing the same data and bending their brands to meet the same data points.
I wonder which piece of research Tesla was answering when the company decided to make its Model X capable of performing a dance. (Seriously, Google it.)
Lastly, listening to people is not the same as empathising with them.
At my agency, Leo Burnett, we talk about putting people first. This does not mean we unthinkingly try to make their world more “frictionless”. (Ferrier shows that, in some instances, more friction helps.)
Instead, it means we have to deeply empathise with them. It means understanding that they’re not just customers, but people, with hopes, dreams, fears, and far more important things to worry about than our brands. It means that we must use research with a deft touch. And it means that we need to make our brands distinctly different.
Ask research for the what, then leave it to the experts to define the why and how.
