The days are long gone since Henry Ford apparently told his customers ‘you can have any colour so long as it is black!”

We all drive different cars of different colours, speak different languages, use different currencies, eat different foods, dress differently – yet why is it that some marketers treat their prospects like they are all exactly the same?

One of my bugbears is those who wrongly assume that everyone uses the same computer and software that they do. In our office we have more Apple Mac computers than we do PCs, yet I am constantly receiving communications that assume I am on a PC.

One marketers’ email newsletter that keeps appearing in my inbox (before quickly going into my trash folder), contains tips on how to use Microsoft Outlook – totally irrelevant to me. Now she is generally a smart marketer, and I assume has surveyed her subscribers and found the majority of them do use this software. There will always be some who ‘don’t fit the mould’ but it is dangerous to assume that we should all fit into a mould in the first place.

Any business that continues to communicate with a prospect with irrelevant information risks, at best, irritating them. And an irritated prospect is not a prospect at all! At worst they are actively disengaged (to borrow a term from employee engagement specialists Kissing Frogs), and often influence others. These people are the antithesis of the product ‘advocate’, which is the holy grail of clients/customers for all businesses to have.

Our BDM, Mark Lincoln, was telling me about a ‘tweet’ that he had been following recently. An actively disengaged customer was bad mouthing his communications service provider. Six others were participating in the ‘tweet’ (including eventually and unwisely, the service provider). Potentially thousands could have been following it. Twitter is just one of many outlets the ‘actively disengaged’ have to get their opinion heard. And they have an audience!

(As an aside, neither protagonist in this tweet came off looking great. And it wasn’t at all wise for the service provider to say his customer was ‘whinging’ where anyone could see the conversation indefinitely.)

In a recent Hot PJ breakfast seminar, veteran direct marketer Rachel Ah Kit talked about this in terms of the ‘Loyalty Leader’,  similar to the one by Murray and Neil Raphel in their book ‘Up the Loyalty Ladder‘. This ladder begins with the ‘prospect’ and moves up through the shopper, customer, client, to the ‘advocate’ at the top.

Unfortunately poorly executed, untargeted marketing to the first rung (or in the case above example, poor communication with the customer on the third rung), can take you quickly sliding off the ladder. The key is in targeting, but never assume, even within your targeted groups, that your prospects will respond the same way to your message.

Posted on May 1st, 2009 by Wendy Riley-Biddle
Filed under: Marketing