Seven - The Relationship Renaissance
With few exceptions, most people think that they are competent at what they do. Most are also warm in that they are considerate of the needs of others. But this is a matter of perspective. The question is not whether you are warm and competent, but whether others perceive you to be so that determines whether they will be willing to interact with you.
In the world of business, it is not whether those who manage a brand think it is warm and competent, but whether the customers think so, that determines the degree to which the brand will succeed. It is not enough to do what you think is fair - but you must ask the other party if they feel they have been treated fairly.
As such, companies should be attuned to the perspective of stakeholders - chiefly their customers - rather than following their own ideas or attempting to conform to abstract standards. In the end, it's the customer's decision whether they buy your brand that will determine your success, not whether customers understand your opinion of why they ought to do so.
Imperative 1: Become More Self-Aware
We rely on our perception of the qualities and abilities of other people, but we suffer from "dangerous" blind spots that hinder our ability to understand how we are perceived. (EN: I would add that we also have the tendency to forget our perception of others is subjective, based on our own experience and filters.) In the networked world, it is very easy to make thousands or millions of impression on others, so it's also very important to be aware of the impression we are making.
As this book has stressed, it is important for a company to foster perceptions of warmth and competence as diligently as they manage their finances. Indeed, if we fail to project warmth and competence, the likely result is that there will be less money for the accountants to obsess over.
Being trustworthy requires others to trust in us - and it is shown that people give their trust to those who are not only capable of helping them, but motivated to apply their capabilities to actually do so - and at the same time to be diligent enough to refrain from doing harm and willing to be attentive to the impact their actions have on others.
The author stresses the need for market research - and likely hiring an outside consultant to run it to ensure that the study is objective and uninfluenced by the company's desire to gather evidence that customers already see them the way they see themselves.
Distraction: Big Data and Customer Profiling
(EN: This was a change in topics from the "know yourself" topic of this section, so I'm breaking it out.)
There's brief reference to the "big data" craze, in which companies came to realize that there is a massive amount of data in their own databases and email systems, not to mention external sources such as social media, that contains information that no-one has paid much attention to. Like others, she insists that there's a great deal of potential there but has no idea how to extract it.
The creepy factor is also mentioned - in that companies that use their data clumsily can make customers uneasy by seeming to know too much about them, or can actually cause offense if they seem arrogantly certain of things the customer believes to be wrong (or does not wish to admit) about himself. Consider Target's "pregnancy prediction score" that enabled them to identify 25 products whose purchase patterns correlate to pregnancy with surprising accuracy - so much so that they messaged customers who weren't aware they were pregnant with targeted messages. In a particularly tense episode, a man was incensed that his teenaged daughter was receiving coupons for motherhood-related items, until he discovered that she was pregnant.
Internet advertising on Google and Facebook is well known to access the content of members messages and postings to decide which ads to display, though this is generally perceived as an act of "warm incompetence" in that customers appreciate the attempt to send relevant messages but mock the terrible inaccuracy. So it's clear that greater accuracy and subtlety are needed.
There are claims that privacy-sensitive customers may be outraged by being tracked and monitored in this way - but thus far the cries have been from the media rather than from customers. Microsoft's "You're getting scroogled" campaign to attract people to its email service with a smear campaign did not result in a flood of users to its own internet-based service that promised not to mine their email data.
Imperative 2: Embrace Significant Change
The authors assert that Domino's Pizza and Sprint both went "from worst to first" in customer service rankings in their industries because they were willing to embrace transformational change. While the loss of business was a blow to their competitors, it is not easy for them to recover because they will have to do something they dread: make significant changes in the way they do business, yielding to the customers' preferences rather than their own.
Customers who appreciate the few companies that listen and respond are beginning to expect the same of all companies with which they interact. They are no longer satisfied by product or price, but look to the entire service and ownership experience. Said another way: the bar has been raised.
The author speaks of the "Michelangelo phenomenon" that deals with the way people develop expectations. Michelangelo, and every legendary artist, changed the way people considered art itself. They were no longer impressed by less talented artists after having seen the work of a grandmaster. At best, it was good, but not as good as the best they had seen. This effect happens much quicker in the modern world. The Internet makes Michelangelo's works visible to everyone instantly - and local artists can no longer count on a lag until patrons in the area have travelled to a distant museum to see the latest work.
The author also mentions how activist groups are empowered. Back in 1986 a British activist group published a pamphlet "What's Wrong with McDonald's" criticizing the healthiness of the food, its exploitation of workers, the damage done to rainforests cleared to raise cattle, etc. McDonald's infiltrated the group, got an injunction to stop distributing the pamphlet, and dragged some of the members of the group into court for libel (and won) - effectively squelching the criticism before it went very far. Today, such a defense would be impossible: the news would be worldwide instantly, its authors would likely be anonymous and difficult to discover, and it would likely have gone viral. McDonald's couldn't prevent it from spreading, but could only deal with the aftermath.
(EN: To address the authors' fear-mongering, the social media also has a defense mechanism, in which some people would be dubious, loyalists to the brand would spring to its defense, and others would later assess the validity of the report and disseminate their evaluation. The only way such an incident would damage a brand is if it had no loyalists and/or if the report was factual.)
Back on topic, companies are now expected to listen and respond to their critics and to take effective action in addressing the causes of valid complaints. They can no longer do a press release to "spin" the news and carry on with business as usual, as that will be even more detrimental to their esteem and credibility.
Imperative 3: Fundamentally Shift Priorities
For many companies, the change to becoming focused on the customer will be dramatic. For over a century, the focus on business has been internal - its own finances and operations - and changing priorities to serve the customer will require more than a minor adjustment.
It will also require support of investors, who have traditionally pressed companies to make short-term returns to provide them with profit, and who must also take a longer term view of their investments. Because the investors own the company and top management is beholden to them, it will require their support to make such a dramatic change in priorities.
Eventually, companies must capitulate to consumer demands in a competitive market - because if they fail to do so, their competitors will. Consider the spate of companies that are making healthier products, or contributing to charitable causes, and engaging in other behaviors that would likely have been unthinkable in the late twentieth century.
(EN: There's quite a bit more about corporate citizenship, which is not really related, except that customers prefer to do business with firms that espouse their political agendas, and will even pay more for brands who have inferior product quality but demonstrate warmth and social consciousness.)