It seems self-evident that brands benefit by making customers happy. Happy customers develop a relationship with the brand and come back to buy it again, or so the logic goes. Sadly, it ain’t necessarily so. Even the happiest customers may be swayed by a competitor’s hot deal. And there are many other ways to get people to buy your brand, and even become loyal to it.
Morgan Spurlock explores some of these in his latest doc, Pom Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. It’s a cleverly satirical piece of work, a fresh look at a familiar issue: how marketers sneakily influence us through product placement and other means.
Pleasing your customers is hard. And, in fact, many marketers do everything they can to avoid doing so. If all those people who say they hate Air Canada stopped flying with them, Air Canada would be out of business by now. But customers still fly with them. Why? Prices, routing … and frequent flyer points. Loyalty programs are just one way of getting customers to come back, even if they hate you.
Contracts are another. Cell phone companies love contracts because they don’t have to worry about pleasing their customers. Then when the contract is almost up, they offer you a hot deal on a new iPhone to keep you hooked.
Of course, competitors can come in and offer better deals without strings attached … but as long as there are high entry barriers (and it helps to have the government on your side, as in airlines and mobile phones) it’s not an issue.
But there are many other ways of influencing customers without making them happy. You can scare them, for example. Governments regularly use this strategy to persuade people not to smoke. Equivalently, you can tell them they are stupid if they do (www.stupid.ca). It’s a strategy that’s tried and tested by deodorant manufacturers, drug manufacturers, toothpaste manufacturers and many others.
Or you can shame them. Wisk laundry detergent’s infamous “Ring Around the Collar” commercial in the 1970’s portrayed women fretting over the state of their husbands’ shirt collars and was heavily criticized by feminists for its stereotyping of women. But it took many years before Lever Bros. capitulated and withdrew it – not because the company was the slightest bit concerned about what the feminist movement thought, but because awareness of the campaign was by then so high that there was no point in beating that particular drum any more. You’ll still find “Ring Around the Collar” proudly streamed on the Wisk website.
Even boring consumers can work, though it’s expensive. If you repeat something often enough, some of it sticks. You can’t be tuned out forever. Or you can shock them, as Benetton did in the 1980’s with its explicit advertising about social and political issues. At the cost of offending a few, you’ll get the media talking – free publicity and the added benefit of letting people know you care about the state of the world and aren’t afraid to say so.
You can turn them into addicts. Spurlock’s movie briefly talks about Neuromarketing, where marketers bypass your defence mechanisms to appeal directly to the pleasure centres in your brain. Scary? Yes, and as we learn more about how the brain works you can expect to see more of it. Well, you won’t actually see it, but you may feel it … or you may just suddenly, unexplainably, have an urge to go get a Budweiser from the fridge.
I wish the news were better. It would be a nicer world if manufacturers were dedicated to making us all happy. But customers are awkward: pampered, emotional, irrational. Up to a point, these things are manageable, but the kicker is this: they all want different things. Pleasing one customer is hard, pleasing two harder, pleasing millions impossible. It’s often easier to play the game of customer loyalty without worrying too much about customer satisfaction.
It makes me thirsty just to think about it. I think I’ll have a Bud.
