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Hello and welcome to a new thread! A thread about Customers. Customers! Are you kidding? What the hell’s interesting about Customers? Well, actually, a great deal.
Being a Customer is an important role in all of our lives. You are a Customer. I am a Customer. We are all Customers. Not just in the sense of acquiring goods and services but also when it comes to general communication and the ‘trading’ of ideas.
Today, in fact, the situation has gone to extremes. Today, the whole Customer thing has become more complicated than ever before because, increasingly, the world now involves you and me as both ‘the Customer’ and ‘the product itself’. It happens every time any of us goes online and accesses information of any kind, whether that information is supposedly free or not. In fact, if something online is free … it’s a sure bet that you are the product or part of the product.
Having made that last point, it would be churlish of me not to point out that, even at this moment, here on Substack, if you are reading Aargh! your level of interest and engagement is being monitored with a view to encouraging you, if you are not already a paying subscriber, to eventually become one. The drawing of inferences is, in this instance, entirely benign (of course!) but, as we will no doubt expand upon in the series, these powers can be and are deployed in pursuit of less noble aims.
The point is, the role of Customer, like everything else in life, is dynamic, subject to continuous change. This, of course, means that there is a history. In the same way that everything else changes, the role of the Customer evolves. And we need to understand that evolution because we need to be able to put ‘Now’ into perspective with ‘Past’ so as to help us to sense ‘Future’. So that’s the plan; that’s what we’re hoping to do; and I purposely refer to ‘we’ because in this series I will be calling on inputs from friends and contacts who have special knowledge about particular aspects of the topic. I hope, too, that you, dear reader, may feel motivated to chip in.
In fact, one of the triggers for launching The Notion of Customer series was a recent conversation with a friend who I shall introduce more fully in the near future. This chap, another David, has an impeccable track record in Customer service and he made the point that, particularly in retail environments but also in any number of other situations, the Customer-Supplier relationship is a two-way dynamic.
That is, just as the Supplier brings specific learned behaviors to any sales situation, so too does the Customer. Marketing and Sales are considered important business functions, but what about the Customer’s role and function as buyer? The behaviours of all parties are influenced by known practices and cultural factors - “This is the way we do things around here.” An understanding of these cultural factors is complicated enough, let alone all of the other considerations that need to be taken into account by suppliers. For example, The Consumer Equality Equation Report, WPP 2022, suggests that UK marketers need to analyze and respond to six distinct ethnic groups: Black, Middle Eastern, Mixed Ethnicity, South Asian, East & South East Asian, White. Multiculturalism brings with it far-reaching implications for the way business is conducted.
But, that’s just a start. Then, there’s technology itself: digital technology itself has given rise to a paradox. Buying practices have been radically influenced by the new technologies. These have notionally brought us all into closer contact, just a few keystrokes away from one another, so that vastly increased communications’ flows are enabled compared with the past. Does this, however, translate into smoother or better transactional practices? We’d probably all agree that sometimes the results are the opposite. But, as David put it when he and I were discussing the issue, “What we mustn’t forget, in order to give a balanced view, is Customer etiquette.”
Which is to say, it’s not just a matter of a Supplier’s methods but also of how best a Customer can or should participate in any buying process. And there’s a great deal of evidence to suggest that our ‘greater communication’ has not necessarily resulted in ‘better communication’. Often, quite the contrary. More chatter, less sense, as one might say. More contact, less proximity.
Again, deconstructing all this means, first, taking a trip into the past in order to track developments over time. So that’s what we’ll embark upon next. The start of the journey will appear here, on Aargh!, in just one week’s time on 14th November.
I do hope you will join the journey.
Best wishes and thanks for reading.