You Sleep When You Die

Your customers must drive your quality. The second you stop listening to them, you become vulnerable. You don’t need to build a fancy contest to get your customers to help you improve quality. What you do have to do, though, is build listening to the customer into your organization.

When you deliver actual, insight-driven value to the consumer that means the consumer delivers loyalty and positive word-of-mouth in return. Delivering only a discount, though, means the consumer has no loyalty, and no reason to buy your brand again, once someone offers a deeper discount.

What if you took that same concept and pushed it a little further next year… by promoting Black Weekend instead of Black Friday? Judging from what we just saw, the consumer is going to be receptive to the idea of a longer, more intense push at the beginning of the shopping season. So why not open up the doors at midnight Thursday, let the crowds in, and host an in-store party all weekend long?

Yes, there are some heavy pressures on some consumers right now.
Yes, there is a lot of uncertainty in our economy as a whole, and in the retail sector particularly.
Yes, there are far fewer discretionary dollars for consumers to spend than there were a few years ago.
But I don’t believe that any of this means that consumers are now destined to be permanently wary of anything but store brands and coupon-driven purchases.

Here’s an experiment for anyone paying serious dollars to a US advertising agency.
1) Print out this blog and take it to your next meeting with your agency; circle the previous paragraph.
2) Ask your agency representative to read that sentence out loud.
3) Ask whether he or she agrees.
4) Take cover, because unless you are working with Zimmerman, the odds are that you are about to be overwhelmed by a tidal wave of bullshit.