The IC3 Blue Train - A little journal about design, marketing, sales and other matters

How do you call your ‘customers’? --- A tribute to Abraham Maslow

It is interesting to observe how ‘customers’ are called in different areas of business. I envision a five-level pyramid with a decreasing importance from top to bottom (from a supplier point of view). Here’s a rough outline of how I see it.

At the top of the pyramid, customers have reached the supreme status of ‘partner’. They are integrated into the supplier’s business and commercial transactions are the result of close collaboration throughout the supply chain. Partners receive utmost consideration and get the best in service and support.

At the next level you have ‘clients’ defined by Webster as persons or companies for whom a lawyer, accountant, advertising agency, etc. is acting . Superficially it looks like a posh way to name a customer with whom you try to establish a relationship. In fact, it implies a mutual understanding on a one-to-one basis. The supplier understands the specific needs of his/her client and the client expects specific treatment. Note that they are called ‘patients’ in the medical field, probably an appropriate name in regard to the length of the queues in most practices **.

Then you have plain vanilla ‘customers’ defined by Webster as persons who buy from an establishment regularly. Here the relationship is rather mono-directional. For a supermarket, customers are statistical entities that can be analysed on a personal basis when they regularly use the same credit card. Yet companies like Amazon remember your name and your shopping habits, like your local butcher. So, the difference between a ‘client’ and a ‘customer’ can be rather fuzzy, except for the fact that a client and her/his supplier are almost always bound by a contract.

Also bound by a contract with a supplier, you find ‘subscribers’ who are significantly more anonymous in the sense that suppliers rarely try to understand their specific needs. Yet many self-centred suppliers won’t hesitate to lambaste late payers and to inundate captive subscribers with junk mail and meaningless offers that are just wasting their money in pretentious extravaganzas.

Finally, at the bottom of the stack, lives the ‘consumer’, the elusive punter, patron, buyer and shopper who has the money all suppliers try to catch. He/she is the silhouette that marketers, statisticians and other anthropologists try to refine through computer analysis, surveys, focus groups and so on.

Astute readers will have noticed that this pyramid is not homogeneous. The top is mainly about B2B (business-to-business) customers and the bottom about B2C (business-to-consumer). But I thought this simple taxonomy could be interesting. What do you think?

** NOTE ** Aren’t you worried that a doctor’s office is called a ‘practice’.

“Do Nothing” is still a very important business option!

After just over ten years of advising large and small businesses on marketing matters, I’m still amazed by how many companies select “do nothing” after seeking advice. And it’s not just me. Last week I shared experience with a good friend who is a financial advisor. He has the same problem, and many of his colleagues witness the same: prospect and customer procrastination.

I roughly and cynically classify customers and prospects in four categories (the picture represents a typical bell curve but I have no statistical evidence to prove it is right – just intuition).

Category 1 people are the ones who reject your advice wholesale. They know better. Most are technology-centric experts in about everything, who sit in the middle of their little box and who can’t appreciate the point-of-view of an outsider. Many even pay for the privilege of not listening to you!

Category 2 companies accept your advice and pay for it. They understand the strategic alternatives, the business development proposals and the implementation plans. But they keep doing the old thing over and over, expecting a different result (this is one definition of insanity ;-), because that's their comfort zone, where ‘change’ is a dirty word.

Category 3 organisations are often lifestyle businesses. The owner feels the need for change, the necessity to move forward and the desire to do something outside of the daily routine / boredom. So, after much procrastination, they agree to try one marketing programme; but it’s often too little too late. And they don’t mind: they have been ‘seriously’ entertained during office hours.

Pretty gloomy so far, isn’t it. Fortunately, category 4 businesses understand that marketing is a two-way street and engage in a series of meaningful and practical actions. They collaborate with advisers to design a strategy, to develop a plan and to execute the right priorities. They understand trials and errors and are quick to adapt. Challenging, but rewarding.

Overall, thank goodness, this business is still lots of fun.

Familiarity breeds contempt

Driving an automobile 10,000 miles per year and being able to check the oil level doesn’t make one a car design expert.

Surfing the net one hour a day and being able to insert pictures in an electronic document doesn’t make one a website production expert.

Many people can play music on a piano but few can create harmonious melodies. A good performer is not necessarily a good composer.

Most people become irrational when planning their own website

In a previous entry about the danger of too much customer ‘centricity’, I mentioned a quotation that haunts me: “Don’t talk too much to your customers because they’ll end up getting what they want, not what they need”. I still haven’t found who actually said that first but, lately, it came back to my mind when participating into the design of a new website.

When you’re in the market for a new car, you sort of know what you need and you’ve a pretty good idea of what fits your budget. If you need is some no-nonsense mid-size automobile you’ll look at VW Golf models and at similar products from Peugeot, Fiat, Ford and so on, knowing what brands are reputable and what cars tend to break down more often than others. Now, what you need is not necessarily what you want. You may dream about owning a sleek two-seater like a Ferrari, a plush limousine like a Mercedes, or a bulky 4WD ‘Chelsea tractor’  like a Hummer. But you know perfectly well that a Golf or equivalent is what you’ll buy because it’s what you need and what you can afford.

Same thing for a new home. You know you need a three-bedroom house with a reasonable garden, a study for your home office, plenty of storage areas, a shed for your workshop and/or for your gardening stuff, and parking space for a car or two. You also quickly figure out what acceptable areas in town fit your budget. And you can see if a house seems well built and, with the help of a surveyor, if you can expect major repairs in the near future. This doesn’t stop you wanting also an additional cottage for visitors, a swimming pool, a tennis court and, like Mrs Bucket’s sister, room for a pony. But you know these add-ons are beyond your budget.

Now, websites. Most of us don’t have the same ‘traditional’ reference points as for cars or houses. Since websites have been around for less than twenty years, few people can tell a good site from a bad one. There are no yardsticks like a VW Passat, a Toyota truck, a solid red brick house, or a convenient family home. Few people can figure out what they really need, what audience they have to reach, and what they have to put up front in their website’s show window to attract visitors. Even fewer people understand what building materials and techniques make a site robust or flimsy, what features make it easy to explore, and how contents should be presented.

Yet, many want home pages looking like Tokyo by night, clever Flash animations, video shows and other gizmos without any idea of the underlying complexity to produce and maintain such follies. Because they lack reference points (and because there are still many ‘cowboy’ website builders out there who sell snake oil behind smoke screens), they have no idea of what are the right price ranges for websites. They want a Ferrari for the price of a VW Polo, or a ten-bedroom mansion for the price of a garden shed. That’s not very reasonable, is it?

It’s hard to swallow one’s own medicine.

In the past three weeks or so, with the help my friends at abricot production , I have been revamping my company’s website , aiming at ‘good’ design and optimum simplicity.

Very interesting experience. It’s quite hard to effectively use one’s own medicine, to make a site as simple as possible, to present information the way users/visitors expect it and, above all, to cut the BS – the tendency we, marketers, have to wrap simple messages into roaring sentences full of hollow adjectives, abbreviations, fashionable expressions and so on. It’s quite difficult to be as factual as possible.

It’s also hard for me to gauge my own website. As stated in the Blue Train Manifesto “ It takes at least two different people to 'do' good marketing ”. I am inside the box. And I would really welcome some outsiders to give me their opinion, good or bad, constructive or destructive. Just shoot. I think (hope;-) I have a thick skin. Ouch!