What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [77]
I wonder whether focusing on the consumer instead of the client ends up usurping much of the job of the agency as we know it. Fixating on customers should be the job of everyone—everyone—in a company. In business, we’ve long said we’re customer focused. But today you have to mean it or your customers will call your bluff. Focusing on customers can’t be outsourced to agencies.
Agencies will resist change until the economics of the industry change. Because agencies make a cut of what they spend, they are motivated to spend more on ads rather than to replace ad dollars with more valuable relationships between brands and customers. So clients may be the first to evolve. Just as I tell newspapers to imagine a day when they stop the presses and book publishers to think past the book, so I advise marketers to imagine as an exercise firing the agency, canceling the ad budget, throwing out the ads, and starting over. What is your relationship with your customers then? Where should you put your money? Where should you spend your first ad dollar and why?
Start, of course, by investing in your product or service. Tobaccowala said no amount of advertising will make up for a bad product. “Stop this yelling and screaming about what’s your Facebook strategy,” he tells clients. “Make absolutely certain that you have a great product or service. Make absolutely certain you have great customer service. Those are the first two rules of so-called advertising in this world. If you don’t have those, don’t pay any money to anyone to do anything.”
Then turn the relationship with the customer upside-down. First, invest in customer service, making it a goal to satisfy every single customer. Remember that your worst customer is your best friend. Second, invest effort in social tools that enable customers to tell you what you should be producing; hand over as much control to them as you can (I examine this idea from another perspective in the chapter on manufacturing). The goal must be to produce a product people love. All companies claim that customers love their brands. But I mean customers love your product so much they want to tell the world—that kind of love, Apple love. Third, hand over your brand to your customers—recognizing that they have always owned it. Don’t tell them what your brand means. Ask them what it means.
Every product is great; every relationship is satisfying—shoot for nothing less. So now you are spending quality dollars and relationship dollars over advertising dollars. You have handed over control of the product and the brand and gotten out of the way. If you haven’t gone out of business by now and convinced every boss, board member, analyst, reporter, and stockbroker that you’ve gone mad, then it probably worked.
Won’t you still advertise? Ask yourself why. To interrupt and irritate random people? No. To convince customers that a bad product is good? No. To inch ahead of your competitor with the brute force of media spending? No. To get people watching Sunday morning shows to buy your stock? Please, no. Do you advertise to tell customers something they didn’t know and need to know about your product, such as an improvement or a better deal? Well, OK. Tobaccowala defines advertising as “the economics of information” (the title of a 1961 essay by Nobel laureate and University of Chicago professor George J. Stigler). Advertising is supposed to tell us about a product or its price so we can save effort, time, and money in our search for it. The internet has made that much more efficient. If the customers’ goal is to reduce their transaction cost—the effort to find the right product at the right price—then doesn’t the internet itself replace advertising? Often, yes.
A 2007 economics honors thesis by Daniel A. Epstein compared the pricing of similar cars listed in expensive newspaper ads with cars listed for free in craigslist. His hypothesis was that sellers who pay to advertise would want