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People are by definition self-centered. Don’t get us wrong: we are not saying there are no such things as empathy. What we mean is that by definition you look at the world from your own perspective. Jack Jones cannot entirely put himself in the shoes of Mary Jones. Pretty obvious, isn’t it? Besides, everyone needs a healthy ego. Only then, you can let go of it once and a while. Organizations are by definition self-centered too because they’re made up of people. Pretty obvious too. They even have some kind of common ego, partially based on values and ego’s from the past but apparent to your customers by the people in the organization today.
We like to call the sum of it all “corporate DNA” or “culture”. And the preception of it by customers – across touchpoints – as “experiences” – customer experiences, brand experiences, all shaping our opinions and those of our peers and far beyond or as Joseph Jaffe also said in his Customer Service Manifesto: “Today, an unhappy customer will tell a million of their closest strangers”.
Businesses and marketers have always struggled with putting the experiences, preferences and needs of customers, audiences and others genuinely first. Because it’s human nature AND because they could get away with it.
They’ve put their beautiful selves, products and traditional PR messages first. Often, they thought they took into account the needs and preferences of customers into account. For instance, by using focus groups or panels, conducting interviews, etc. But most of the time they assumed they knew what mattered and those assumptions were made up (and still are) in boardrooms where the HiPPO’s ruled and the customers were absent.
When one-way communication (from brand to customer/consumer) increasingly got under pressure (“hey, our customers have a voice”) with all kinds of new media (owned, shared, etc.), channels and whatnot popping up, combined with – among others – decreasing trust, the earlier mentioned heightened customer expectations, the arrival of more customer-oriented competitors, increasing connectivity, the real-time nature of the digital age, etc., that model came seriously under pressure. “The customer is empowered”. “The customer is in control”. You know the mantras. This “shift” is what we mean with the Copernican revolution.
