Of consumers and unicorns

B2C marketers talk about consumers all the time. Consumer insights. Consumer needs. Consumer benefits. Consumer centricity. The entire marketing enterprise is supposedly built around this thing called "the consumer."

There's just a small problem. Consumers don't exist. There's no such thing. "The consumer" is a chimera, a reification.

There is consumption behavior. People do engage in the behavior of buying and then consuming various goods and services. But identifying or defining people as "consumers" is entirely inappropriate and it masks the complexity of human nature - and, even, human behavior.

The "thing" that is buying and consuming is not a buying / consumption machine. (Though we have done our best to confuse this point.) The "thing" is a human being. A person. At one moment it buys or consumes. At another it loves or grieves. At another it reaches up to the heights to exalt itself and others. And at another it stoops down to commingle with the dirt. Even more, it does all of this at once.

When we attempt to succeed in business by somehow influencing a "consumer," all we are doing is closing our minds to the richness of the person we seek to influence. Our behaviors are, thus, necessarily shallow and incomplete. If we were, instead, to insist on always imagining a complete human being in front of us, I suspect we would realize that our marketing efforts are not only woefully inadequate, but often counterproductive.

So let's stop using the word "consumer." Or, at least, let's use it as we use the word "unicorn." Instead, let's think about people. Talk about people. And seek to make people's lives better. In so doing, we can create success for our businesses.

My new FB friend policy

I'm interested in connecting with people that are really my friends. People I would actually enjoy having a beer with and who would enjoy having one with me (if they liked beer). I like meeting new people on FB when I can enrich myself (and hopefully them) by sharing ideas and interests. I have met some people on FB, like the great Craig DeLarge, that I consider friends because of the connection we've made online. For this reason I value FB a lot.

However, FB has a dark and unseemly side. One that devalues the very concept of friendship. One that devalues ideas by turning everything into often crude soundbites. (I do enjoy crude soundbites, but I don't want to live in a world where they are the sole means of communication.) I am not interested in helping you with your narcissistic quest to have as many FB "friends" as possible. I am not interested in helping you convince yourself that you're important because lots of people seem to care about what you have to say. I might be interested in helping you with your business networking, but not on FB. Find me on LinkedIn and we'll see.

So, effective one week from now, I am cleaning up my friend list. I would rather have one good FB friend than 1000 fake ones. I will be maintaining people on my friend list if they are true friends in the offline world, if they add to the value of my life by sharing ideas with me, if they make me think, if they seem to care about me somehow and make me care about them, and so on in this spirit.

Anyone who does not evidence the qualities of friendship with me or the promise of becoming one in the future, is not going to remain on my FB list. Hopefully no hard feelings folks. But I find it rather offensive to use the sacred word "friend" to describe someone who isn't.

How are we supposed to respect the law when...

Check out this article. Judges in the State of Washington have ruled that it is permissible for teachers to have sex with their 18 year old students.

Of course I understand. Our legislators are too damn busy deciding what we can eat, where we can smoke, how many gallons of water our toilets can use per flush, etc. to be bothered with something as unimportant as teachers sexually manipulating their impressionable young students.

Apple is amazing!!!

I just placed an order at the Apple online store on behalf of my kids. They wanted to buy their mom an iPod. As soon as the order went through, I realized that I had forgotten to ask for gift wrapping.

So I called their 800 number since I thought that would be the quickest way to amend the order. My order was placed at 8:29PM. I was on the phone talking to a rep at 8:44PM. The iPod was already engraved, packaged and waiting for UPS or Fedex to pick it up.

That is just breathtakingly awesome! Kudos to Apple!

I think the next step is for them to have packages delivered to people before they even know they're going to order it.

Some photos of a beautiful sunset

Here are three photos that I took on my way home from upstate NY just a few hours ago. Sadly, I was unable to capture what I thought were the most breathtaking scenes. There was just no place to stop my car on the side of the highway. But I saw what I saw and it will be part of me forever.

I hope you enjoy these.

Preying on impulses

Marketers spend quite a bit of time thinking about how to encourage impulse buying. In a sense, trying to encourage impulse buying is a form of gravity fighting. You're trying to get people to do something that they didn't really want to do.

[See my earlier posts on the folly of gravity fighting.
http://adam-1001words.blogspot.com/2008/06/gravity-usually-wins.html

http://adam-1001words.blogspot.com/2008/12/innovation-rule-5-dont-fight-gravity.html]

But although I do believe that trying to fight gravity is generally a foolish strategy, it does not fail entirely. There are ways to get people to do what they don't really want to do. There's quite a bit of art and science behind this. Good retailers study this carefully. They know which products to put near the cash registers. They know what kind of signage will "interrupt" people. And so on.

I'm seeing a lot more of this sort of behavior on the part of businesses. The poor state of our economy puts pressure on businesses to sell sell sell. So I'm getting lots more emails with all sorts of sales incentives.

But let's play around a bit with the notion of impulse buying. I think it's safe to say that, in general, the impulse purchase is one that the consumer didn't need. If it was a need, it would have been on the shopping list. One way or another, people manage to buy their needs (assuming they can afford to do so). You don't have to encourage the need based purchase. You may need to make sure that it's your brand or product that is selected to fill the need, but you do not have to convince people to buy what they need.

Impulse purchases, on the other hand, are not needs. They are wants. And they aren't even really significant wants or they would have ended up on the shopping list. Rather, they tickle some small non-rational fancy buried somewhere in our minds that we probably cannot explain or justify.

Since people don't need these, I would argue that they are harmful. Why? Because they consume resources for no good reason. People are spending money that they could have used for a need or a truly significant want, on something that will do almost no good for them. In more flush times, this may not be so bad. But now that consumers are genuinely strapped and many are out of work, can we morally defend business practices that encourage impulse buying?

I wonder whether devising marketing strategies to get people to impulsively buy more gum, DVDs, options for their new car, etc. is on firmer moral ground than prostitutes trying to drum up business by finding married men they know are sexually unsatisfied. (Assume for the moment that prostitution was legal.) Or the alcohol industry trying to sell to recovering alcoholics. Or the mortgage industry trying to sell homes to people who couldn't afford them. Oh wait, they actually did that. My point is that all of these situations involve impulses. The sexually unsatisfied man has impulses. The recovering alcoholic has impulses. And shoppers have impulses.

When you spend time developing strategies and tactics to get people to add a few more items - that they don't really need or want - to their shopping cart, how are you better than the prostitute, booze pusher or predatory lender? Because you just sold a pack of gum and it doesn't cost that much or really hurt anyone? OK, you have a point. But not a very strong point. I'll agree that there is a quantitative difference between "taking" someone for $1 and conning someone out of thousands or wrecking their marriage... But it's just a quantitative difference. The fundamental behavior is the same. You have used guile to get people to do something that is bad for them and good for you.

On one hand, I say "shame on you!" On the other hand, our economy is entirely dependent on this. Maybe it's shame on us all.

Seem my earlier post regarding excessive consumption and Tim Jackson's poignant comments on the issue.

Sales without selling at Nordstrom

Below is a card I received from a shoe salesman that sold me one or more pairs of shoes at Nordstrom several months ago.



For me, it is a perfect example of how I like to be sold to. Fred knows he's trying to sell. I know Fred's trying to sell. Fred knows that I know he's trying to sell. I know that Fred knows he's trying to sell. And now you know that Fred knows that I know that he knows he's trying to sell. What I'm trying to say is that we all know Fred is trying to sell.

But here's the magic. It doesn't feel that way to me. And you know what? Feelings matter. [Can someone pass me a hankie please?] I feel that Fred is just treating me like a human being. He's thanking me for "letting" him help me in the past. He makes no mention whatsoever of his desire to help me in the future. He doesn't say anything about hoping to see me again soon. None of that. He just thanks me for being a customer in the past.

Super classy and it makes me feel great.

Just another reason why I buy all my shoes at Nordstrom.