Web ecosystem: rise of the grudger customer
On the Web a new type of customer is rising. One more and more immune to marketing happy talk. One that wants facts before emotion.
In his seminal book, The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins explores the idea of the sustainable ecosystem. In one game of life there were three players: suckers; cheats and grudgers.
Each player needs to find another to scratch its back. Suckers scratch the back of whoever asks them. Cheats ask to get their backs scratched but never return the favor. Grudgers scratch a back if asked, but if you don’t return the favor they will never scratch your back again.
Too much marketing and advertising treats the customer like a sucker. By cleverly manipulating our core emotions, advertising gets us to buy products that are never quite what they seem. (Have you ever seen a car advertisement shot in rush hour traffic?)
Of course, marketing is not entirely to blame here. The consumer is nearly always a sucker to complexity in the store, while cursing its lack of simplicity once they take it home. Our reason and logic has long suffered from our relentless tsunami of emotions.
The game of scratching begins and the cheats race into the lead, driving the suckers and grudgers close to extinction. However, as there are less and less suckers to exploit, the grudgers slowly begin to advance. Over time, the grudgers rise and rise, with the cheats declining and the suckers never recovering. It seems that a sustainable ecosystem is dominated by grudgers.
Last week I rented a car with Hertz. It started off at $85 for two days, but by the time I left the office, the price was $266. The Hertz rep was very smooth, very friendly, convincing me to buy a full tank of gas, because he estimated I’d use most of it. (I used half of it.)
A large multinational found that every time it added a “hero shot”-that perfect, smiling face-to a webpage, the number of customers who left the page immediately after arriving shot up. Once the hero shot was removed customers stayed on the page much longer.
Puzzled, the multinational started doing some usability testing. A typical response from a customer was: “When I see a picture like that I just think marketing. I’m at the website to solve a problem. I don’t have time for this stuff.”
As long as the world was full of suckers it was easy for marketing cheats to make an easy killing. But while the Web has its suckers, it really is the land of grudgers. It is the land of comparison shopping and customer reviews. It is the land of rapid search and the Back button.
The Web is where customers become the biggest organization of all, because the Web allows them to organize in a way they never could before. A good product or service has nothing to fear from the Web. The grudger will trust, but you had better deliver.
The media lives off our fears. Advertising lives off our dreams. The grudger customer is nobody’s fool.
The Selfish Gene (on Wikipedia)
James Bull says:
Added on November 12th, 2007 at 7:14 amI don’t think there’s anything new about the customer being in control, at least at the level of the individual transaction.
We’ve always had the choice to walk out of a shop and go down the road to the competitor. People have been cynical about advertising for as long as I can remember. And how many direct marketing letters go straight into the bin?
The difference with the web is the scale and speed at which we can find, process and communicate information. But that works for the marketers as well as the grudgers - so is the balance of power really shifting?
Martin Hayman says:
Added on November 12th, 2007 at 10:05 amWhat’s the relevance of the Hertz anecdote?
Gerry McGovern (blog author) says:
Added on November 12th, 2007 at 7:29 pmMartin, The Hertz anecdote is how some organizations treat us as suckers. They pull us in with a cheap price and then add on all the extras.
Alan says:
Added on November 12th, 2007 at 8:51 pmJames, I think the balance of power has definitely shifted. Consumers’ product reviews on Amazon or Cnet can be seen by thousands. Where in the old world (pre-1995) did an individual consumer have so much influence over the purchasing decisions of others?
Mary Mulvihill says:
Added on November 14th, 2007 at 11:16 amSticking with the evolutionary theme of The Selfish Gene, and Gerry’s car hire example: Hertz’s attitude to customers also creates an ecological niche for a new online product — insurance for grudgers hiring a car, who want to avoid all those extra charges, and indeed here it is:
http://insurance4carhire.com/
As for buying a full tank of petrol from Hertz: that has to be the most expensive way to buy fuel. But it’s also a trade-off: the 15 minutes of your time to locate a petrol station, or pay a premium and let Hertz refill the car.
Jen from Canada says:
Added on November 14th, 2007 at 7:19 pmWe all agree that marketing is losing its effect on people. But I also think that organizations are slow-w-w-w-w-l-y realizing this.
As it is, Marketing is not really marketing. Its all about promotions. In most organizations, marketing people have no input into the development of the product (especially in the case of high tech products), nor do they have input in how it is distributed to the consumers (that is left to logistics).
Marketing has only been given the “promotion” side of things. So, they come up with catchy slogans, tag lines, beautiful watermarks to convey their brand…in essence, marketing is very limited. Which is why I think how marketing is done needs to change (and this coming from someone who does marketing). The Internet has changed all that for marketers and I constantly see marketers trying to use Web 2.0 or social networking in their “strategy” to sell the product more. But they don’t go any further than the surface. They use traditional thinking (i.e. put the product in the best light) to sell the product or service in a Web 2.0 world. And I see this from the CEO and all the executives as well. They still want to push the organizational-centric approach, but they do this unwittingly. Its not a conscious thing, and they have a tough time understanding what it means to be customer-centric (yes, can you see it now, all the executives heads are nodding). But reality bites, and we revert back to making the product look good by surrounding it with pretty girls/boys who are using the product in the best circumstance…that is not reality. The trick is to make organizations realize that they need a customer advocate and to provide them with the power to have input into the product (and to change what it can and cannot do). We need the customer advocate to understand the customer so that they know that the product matches the customer need and WHEN we need to “let the customer know about our product.” Unfortunately, this is easy to say, its just not easy to do.
Gerry McGovern (blog author) says:
Added on November 15th, 2007 at 5:12 pmJen, I think you’re addressing something very important here. My own background is in marketing, and I think the Web opens up a whole new opportunity for marketing. Not fluffy marketing–meaty marketing.
Everyone wants to be customer-centric. It’s a great buzzword. But the reality is that organizations are by nature organization-centric. We have to work every day to become more customer-centric.
Gerry McGovern (blog author) says:
Added on November 15th, 2007 at 5:17 pmMary, thanks for the link–definitely wortwhile if you’re renting a lot. Oh, I felt like a sucker after buying that full tank! Buy he sold it to me as if I would save money because he said the price per gallon was less than at the gas stations. And, of course, the convenience was attractive. But that’s traditional sales techniques, isn’t it.
Jen from Canada says:
Added on November 16th, 2007 at 12:26 amYes, by nature organization are navel-gazers (they just cannot help it and they do not mean to do it intentionally). But I also think that most marketers (and their executives) are so scared of missing the next “Facebook”-techy thing that they try a blog, and they do a podcast, or the create a wiki for their “users” without really understanding how their customers are engaging in the social network. I just ran across Josh Bernoff’s (Forrester Researcher) work, titled, “Objectives: The key to creating a social strategy” and his work is more about “meaty marketing” (I would actually argue that we use the word “relevant marketing” as opposed to “fluffy marketing” which is easy because we cannot accurately track our success and we get to treat the customers as suckers).
Its tough for a marketer to fight “fluffy marketing” when the whole organziation totally supports it.
Gerry McGovern (blog author) says:
Added on November 16th, 2007 at 9:06 amThe Web brings with it a major opportunity. Organizations must change and become more customer-centric. So, Jen, I believe there’s an opportunity to change the face of marketing. I’ll take some risks and lots of effort perhaps over many years, but the rewards of meaty marketing are definitely there.