Marketers vs. Consumers
Was telling my ex-colleague yesterday, I now have to do data entry myself! Yesterday we hired a few freelancers to call our customers hoping to get some quick feedback on a new package that the content strategy people has come up with. So I had to design a short questionnaire for that, and later on did the data entry and some simple crosstabs myself. Is not that we got no budget to spend on research, it is faster to do this way in order to get the super quick results. You wouldn’t want to know how the procurement works over here.
Anyway, that is not my point. So they’ve come up with this “brilliant” idea which they think that consumers would surely like. But just to be on the safe side, let’s test it with our customers. It turned out to be a “no no” from customers’ point of view. That is not what they want! The customers exclaimed. Well I guess this happens all the time. Sometimes marketers or brand managers are too into their brand to that extent they’ve overlooked simple basic things like that. Often than not, they’re too proud of their brand and they think that customers SHOULD be happy for what they give. They have forgotten the basic rule of ‘buying and selling’ - you sell because there’s a demand.
I mean I am no marketing expert. There ought to be many other things to take care of like financial margins, costs, relationship with suppliers etc etc. Hence the gap between expectation and delivery. Sometimes I become really confused, I am a consumer myself but I am also part of the brand. Should I support what they do so that our year end bonuses would not be compromised? Or should I insist that we should satisfy our customers as much as possible? It’s harder now to give implications compared with last time. We used to just present what we thought would be the right action for the benefit of the consumers, and from what we saw in the data. It is not as simple as that anymore. SIGH.
