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Most marketing textbooks teach the 4 P’s of marketing (Product, Price, Place, Promotion). Although the promotion aspect of marketing gets the most attention the other 3 P’s are equally important in a successful business. If there’s no product worth buying, no amount of promotion will make it successful. Likewise, if the price is above what the market will allow, no units will move. Also, if you have everything else right (the price, product, and promotion are all ideal for the market) if the consumer can’t find how to obtain the product, it doesn’t do anybody any good.
However, I argue there is one more P that is the most important—people. We often use the term consumer so much we forget that everything we do as marketers and businesspeople is supposed to satisfy the needs and desires of people…real people. Today’s most successful companies are aware of this, and they incorporate people and their feedback into every component of marketing, from product design to communication. Smart companies know that people keep the bills paid. Smart companies know that people talk. Smart companies are coming up with solutions that people need and want often before people know they need and want them. Take Apple’s iPad for example.
Employees and customers must be treated with the utmost respect, as though they’re the ones making and buying the products. Oh wait, they are. Remember that.
However, I argue there is one more P that is the most important—people. We often use the term consumer so much we forget that everything we do as marketers and businesspeople is supposed to satisfy the needs and desires of people…real people. Today’s most successful companies are aware of this, and they incorporate people and their feedback into every component of marketing, from product design to communication. Smart companies know that people keep the bills paid. Smart companies know that people talk. Smart companies are coming up with solutions that people need and want often before people know they need and want them. Take Apple’s iPad for example.
Employees and customers must be treated with the utmost respect, as though they’re the ones making and buying the products. Oh wait, they are. Remember that.
I was in a group session the other day when the question, “Why is it so difficult to include the voice of the poor in policy and discussion?” arose. The group members offered many reasons the voice of the poor is often muted. Most of the discourse centered on education and systems that perpetuate class structures. While these substantiated arguments made a lot of sense, to me the issue can narrowed largely to two antecedents: inclusion and access, or lack thereof.
Inclusion
How many times have we walked passed a homeless person and tried your hardest not to make eye contact? Why do we do that?
We often try to resolve issues without first developing a clear understanding of the situation and the parts that keep the system going. That’s human nature—we operate by limiting the information we perceive and make decisions based on those limited sets of information. Just because something may be human nature doesn’t mean it’s the right way to do something.
How can we expect the poor to have a voice when we don’t include them in the conversation? The poor are not represented in our political system. Ethnography is not a common practice among politicians. Who was the last public official you knew of who spent any significant time living with poor people as they do in order to gain a clearer understanding of their unique issues? Go head, I’ll wait. Unless we spend considerable time with the people we are trying to serve we cannot develop solutions that will adequately address their issues. We will only serve those with which we have more intimate relationships. Otherwise we’re using limited information to create ethnocentric solutions that may or may not solve problems that do or do not exist.
Access
In my opinion, access is the today’s social currency. The gap between access to social, cultural, and financial institutions is widening. It doesn’t matter whether you’re black, white, male, female, gay, straight, or whatever. If you don’t have access to education, health facilities, nutritious food, a safe environment, the likelihood you’ll be able to reach your goals (and in many cases develop goals) is severely lessened. For example, we still have a large portion of our country that doesn’t have access to the Internet (See digital divide). It’s hard for somebody to apply for a job online and check the status of that application if the Internet is not readily available to them. If we don’t work to ensure that people have access to, and the literacy around, the systems in place we can never expect they participate. How does one register to vote? Who’s my council person? If I have a complaint, to whom do I voice that complaint? What if I’m qualified for a job, but never get it because I don’t have the right connections?
If you want to know what somebody is thinking, ask them. It’s not easy. In order to face “them” we must first face ourselves. However, if we don’t invite people to the conversation, and make it possible for them to do so, we will never work together to create comprehensive and sustainable solutions. Until we make all stakeholders part of the conversation we won’t even begin to be able to identify all the real issues for which we need those solutions.
In 2010, 58% of CEO’s responded that customer concerns and demands were very important to business decisions. At first glance, this may seem odd. Afterall, shouldn’t it be 100%? What’s really interesting, though, is that the percentages that CEO’s responded to employees and government were 45% and 39% respectively. This means that CEO’s find it more important to listen to their customers than their employees or even the government.
Therefore, as customers we must understand that we hold much more power than we often realize. Recently, I had an issue with receiving support from Adobe, Inc. I made several attempts to get a simple issue resolved. I made multiple phone calls, web chat sessions, and web tickets. After several escalations, transfers, and holding, nothing was ever accomplished. I was tempted to give up and resign my attempts to find a resolution.
I instead decided to use my power as a customer to have the issue more salient. I wrote a blog post explaining exactly what was going on and how their lack of support was forcing me, and others, into a situation where we have to choose eBooks based on platform rather than content, and how the customer experience suffers greatly as a result. I made sure to include the Adobe Twitter handle (@adobe) into the title of the blog post. I did this so that every time the post is re-tweeted, it will show up on Adobe’s feed. After rereading the post a few times to make sure it didn’t sound more inflammatory than I intended, I hit “publish.” Moments later, I tweeted the article with one last plea for help to Adobe’s Customer support (@adobe_care).
The result: I tried for months to receive seemingly simple customer support (and I’ve worked in support and customers service for years) to no avail. Within 1 ½ hours of posing the blog post, I received an email from a dedicated support engineer complete with an email address I could reply to, a name, and a cell phone number. It’s amazing how fast things change when we hold companies accountable publicly.
I like to think that my issue with Adobe was fairly minor. If you’d like to judge for yourself, you can find the original post here. However, the implications are much more important. If Adobe responds within an hour of making a complaint public, imagine what we can do when we hold our companies to higher standards with regards to social, economic, and ecological sustainability or when we hold them to higher standards with regards to equality and human rights. We can vote with our wallets, but we can also (and must) vote with our voices. The stage is yours…