So ran the fabulous headline in the Daily Mash yesterday.
'Britain's newest hight street bank has promised not to pretend to be your friend', the article began before decsending into the sort of language unfit for a blog like this.
Like all good satire, it's based in a truth. We've talked here before about converging brands, and how corporations have stopped trying to tell you what they do and now just try to tell you what they're like. And guess what? They're just like you. You might call this the 'Sarah Palin' school of marketing. Her appeal is not based on any degree of competence for the high office to which she aspired (and will aspire to again). Her appeal is that she's just like you.
This new school of marketing spends much time emphasising 'conversations' and other friendly things. 'Time spent with' has become the new measure of success. But is this really what successful looks like? To return to banks for a second, their most successful service innovations have been web-banking and, before that, the ATM - two things actively designed to minimise the time you spend with the 'brand'.
Obvioulsy I don't want to be misconstrued. These measures are not always wrong any more than they're always right. We just have to understand customer motivation before we start asking them to commit 'time' to our brand. Google is another instructive lesson. They won the search wars of the early web not through superior algorithms (as some claim), but because they understood that consumers want to spend as little time on a search engine as possible - they're just a way of getting to something else. So they didn't try to keep you on the site, or try to change into a 'portal'. The rest is history.
For more, there's an excellent discussion of these issues on the HBR site under the provocative title 'Why Your Customers Don't Want To Talk To You', which opines that, first, companies massively over estimate the extent to which consumers want to talk to brands and second, that this approach may undermine long term loyalty.
In the meantime, perhaps we should sometimes consider the revolutionary thought that the best way to 'delight our customers' might be to spend less time with them.
(Thanks to TAC & Lloydy)
-- Toby
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