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embraced the call of relationship marketing, we still face a tough hurdle. True customer
intimacy the backbone of a successful, rewarding relationship requires a deep
understanding of the context in which our products and services are used in the course of
our customers day-to-day lives. Put simply, it requires a comprehensive view of
consumer behavior. And the foundations of our marketing work our Western analytic
research methods are simply not capable of providing that view. They have set us up
to fail, time and again.
Consider for a moment how we measure the capstone of relationship marketing:
customer satisfaction. Is it simply a question of expectations versus actual performance
on a given attribute of a product or service? Is it a static, context-free rating on a five-
point scale? The stories of consumers on the edge suggest that they aren t simply
pleased or displeased with their computers, their answering machines, their trips to the
grocery store. They are satisfied or dissatisfied with the quality of their lives in today s
world. For contemporary consumers, product satisfaction is linked inextricably with life
satisfaction, and companies must attend to both these dimensions if they expect to win.
Let s face it: problem-focused research studies and runaway numbers crunching are
misleading. They are not designed to reveal the kind of consumer discontent we re
describing; and in fact, they may get in the way of such insights. Isolated ratings of the
sugar content in cereal or the readability of digital displays tell us nothing about
despairing consumers and the role that marketing policies play in exacerbating their
discontent. To get inside people s heads, marketers need to turn to the tools of
ethnography and phenomenology: qualitative social-science methods dedicated to richly
describing and interpreting people s lives. Videotapes and photography also are good
reporting tools. They can reveal what a "day in the life of the customer" is all about.
Finally, long-term studies work better than ad hoc surveys in painting an accurate
picture of how consumers react to and use products.
We also can tap into underutilized data scattered within organizations to develop a more
complete and intimate picture of consumers. Customer-service hot lines, for example,
are a source of great insight, but few companies use them for that purpose. Ironically,
many have outsourced their 800-number services and customer-response hot lines in the
wake of cost cutbacks. Another underutilized resource is the World Wide Web. Because
marketers do not directly maintain or intervene in product discussion groups, the
conversations that develop there are especially revealing. Managers at Intel learned
quickly but not quickly enough about the role played by discussion groups in fueling
marketplace crises such as the one the company experienced with the Pentium
processor. Soap opera writers regularly monitor viewers reactions to evolving story
lines, changing characters and plots in response to the voiced concerns of viewers.
Middleburg Interactive Communications in New York has launched a new service called
M-3 to serve this very need. M-3 scans the Internet daily for consumer discourse about
companies and their brands and then offers its clients advice on how to respond.
There also are many readily available sources of relevant information outside
companies. For example, more formal use could be made of trend analyses, such as
those offered by the Yankelovich Monitor, Roper Reports, and the Public Pulse. These
services provide cutting-edge indicators of shifts in the consumer psyche. Ad agencies
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also are likely purveyors of trend information. And there s the recently formed
International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies, which sponsors annual conferences
and publications. Secondary data are another overlooked source of valuable information
about consumers. We should be reading our target groups magazines, watching their
television shows, learning what issues dominate their fields of vision, and tracking how
those concerns evolve and change over time.
Understanding the consumer will above all require us to get out into the field. And that
doesn t just mean the researchers. It means senior managers, middle-level managers,
engineers. If the target customer that a Kraft Foods manager is pursuing is the so-called
middle-American mom, that manager should rent a van, drive her team to DeSoto,
Missouri, and "live with the natives." She should go to church with them, hang out at the
local VFW, attend the parent-teacher conference on Thursday night. One of the authors
of this article did just that when working for Young and Rubican Advertising. Ten years
later, video reports from that field-based research on the "new traditional woman" still
inform creatives opinions about the real consumers of Jell-O and other classic
mainstream brands. Perhaps it s time we take the philosophy of "customer visits"
embraced in business-to-business marketing into the customer domain.
To be truly effective, however, these methods require grounding in a strong disciplinary
base of theory. Simple mastery of methods long the kingpin of power in a data-
intensive world will no longer suffice. Understanding consumers experience means
embracing theories of philosophy, communications, counseling, psychology, and
religious studies. Even such disciplines as medicine, law, and literature have a lot to
offer. Each can give us a new, broad perspective on the emotional lives of our
consumers and help us get past the narrow views that training has inured us to.
We can t do all this without redressing the role of marketing research. If researchers
were truly the consumer specialists we intend them to be, primarily responsible for
understanding their customer mainstream Americans, technophobes, or whatever
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