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Making sure customers are central to every decision you make about marketing Here is a back issue of Marketing Booster, the email newsletter that Richard Groom writes and sends free every fortnight to subscribers. You can subscribe here or read over 60 back issues using the back issues index page. I had an interesting conversation over a lunchtime drink earlier today with a few marketers from various organisations. Unlike me, they all work for big organisations, and unsurprisingly the subject of office politics came up. When I started working for myself four years ago I realised for the first time how much energy in companies is wasted on office politics. I hadn't seen it clearly when I was in the thick of the corporate world, even though I got caught up in the squabbles just like everyone else. You know the kind of thing: arguments over who's responsible for tasks, where everyone sits in the hierarchy, where to apportion blame and so on. As an example, one of my lunch companions today mentioned that an argument over what a colleague's job title should be took weeks to resolve. A whole batch of business cards had to be scrapped and re-printed to reflect the new job title. So how about this for an easy reference tool to use whenever any kind of office argument crops up: 1. Ask yourself: do your customers care about it? 2. If customers don't care, stop arguing and get on with something else. 3. If customers do care, make a decision with them in mind. In other words, think like a marketer at all times. So for the job title example mentioned above, how about choosing a job title that will instantly tell customers what you do. Forget about hierarchy (customers don't care) or fancy phrases (they confuse customers) and just come up with a clear, simple and customer-focused title. OK, I admit I am being a little flippant here. But really, does anyone matter more than your customers? Here's another example about the value of remembering it's the customers who matter. The other week I was talking to someone in the production department of a client organisation who was briefing me so I could write a new product brochure. He seemed to spend a lot of time giving me information about how long his company had been running, how great they were and so on. He was also explaining all the office politics issues, in terms of which products should be given most space in the brochure. I wasn't really getting much useful information. So I took him through a few of the brainstorming exercises I often use during briefing sessions. After an hour he leant back in his chair and said: "I guess what we should do is write about the customers' situation and what matters to them, and not just about our company." Suddenly, he had escaped the secluded world of his company and all the petty arguments raging within it. He had joined his customers in their world. He was thinking like a marketer. So in both of these examples, the useful benchmark was to think about what matters to the customer. Once you do that, the answer is probably fairly easy to find. Of course, first you need to know what matters to customers, so you need the right monitoring processes in place. Customer research is one, but so too is something simple like making sure customer-facing staff can easily pass feedback, comments and observations on to the marketing team. Sorry if you're sitting there thinking 'well tell me something I don't know'. But maybe a reminder that every organisation on the planet exists to serve customers is useful now and again. The next time you (and me) are in a dilemma about something, let's try thinking about our customers. Maybe that's where the answer lies. Copyright 2004 Richard Groom |