Customers – friend or foe?

Organisations speak about customers in a militaristic way way that actually impedes their ability to understand how to serve them. Does yours?

Surprisingly, marketers are the worst at this. They talk about ‘target’ markets or ‘target’ customers and, as one canadian website recommends, ‘..zero in on your target’;  we get involved in ‘guerrilla marketing’,  talk about “impacts” and “impressions” and read Campaign magazine about advertising campaigns.

Now I confess that I too have used these expressions before (although I hope I never said ‘zero in’!). But today, I urge you to join me and say ‘no more’ to this ludicrous language. Apart from anything, from a psychological point of view, it’s really dumb to talk about customers in this way.

Repeated actions shape our attitudes. Talking about customers like this creates an ‘us and them’ mentality, positioning customers as the enemy, pictured through the sights of a marketing gun, putting distance between brand and customer. This distance reduces the capacity for empathy or understanding and reduces relationships to the basest of exchanges. Yet the role of a marketer is actually the reverse of this. Marketers should be looking at their organisation from the perspective of the customer and reporting back on where they stand in customers’ minds relative to the competition. And if they delved deep, they would see that often customers actually feel like a target, with many cocked weapons pointing at them and unsure as to which is the friendliest proposition.

So it’s down to you. Choose between the Rambo type approach to marketing or change your behaviour and work out how you can collaborate with customers not target them. A much better mindset for business and a better way to treat customers.

Francis

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