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When called upon to rescue an eight-year-old boy from a third-floor window ledge, Somchai Yoosabai, a fireman in Thailand, faced a problem: the boy was so terrified that he refused to come into the fireman's arms. “Someone suggested that since the boy was a fan of the comic hero, Spiderman, if Somchai could shed his fireman's uniform and don a Spiderman suit, the boy would lose his fear. A Spiderman suit was quickly organised from a nearby toy store and Somchai donned it and rescued the now comforted child, who was thrilled with the knowledge that his hero had arrived to save him.”
Narrating this story, Cyrus M. Gonda and Kalim Khan write in Seal the Hole in the Bucket: Re-master the lost art of marketing (www.landmarkonthenet.com) that even emergency services can perform better if they understand their customer.
Know your customer
A chapter titled ‘Understand your customer' opens by asking, ‘Do you know who your customer is?' and adds that when you dig deep the simple question may bring out the prevailing confusion. The authors rue, for example, that soft-drink majors consider their distributor to be their customer rather than the person who consumes the drink. “Many newspapers operate under the assumption that it is their advertisers who are their customers, as that is where they get the lion's share of their revenue. Such newspapers consider the reader to be only a by-product.”
A related question posed in the chapter is, ‘How well do you know your customer?' To explain this, the authors take us to Ensign Bookstore in Mumbai, where the owner is almost always around to attend to customers, and is a delight to interact with. He takes pride in knowing his regular customers and also their choice of reading material, the authors report.
They cite this instructive quote from the storeowner: “I will not show every book that has recently arrived in the store to every regular customer. I will ensure that from the books I show a specific customer, he would at least buy seven out of 10.”
That is a very high conversation rate, possible only when you know your customer, advise Gonda and Khan. And, the gyan from the storeowner is, “My filtering stage is the first. The customer's filtering stage is secondary… Why should I undermine my own credibility?”
Vague ‘key'
Compare such a positive and enlightened attitude with the lethargic approach of many key account managers in large corporates, the authors fret. They remind that irrespective of the industry, almost all key account managers serve the critical 20 per cent of the organisation's customers generating 80 per cent of the revenue.
While, therefore, these key customers need to be treated with care, what the authors find to their shock is the typical answer to the question, ‘How many key accounts do you handle?' The response is, ‘Somewhat around 20.' When a key account manager is so vague and not even aware as to the exact number of key accounts he is handling, the question of understanding each one of them does not even arise, Gonda and Khan argue.
A related tenet proposed in the book is that one ‘C' (customer) is greater than the four ‘Ps' (my product, my pricing, my place, and my promotion). The concept of the four Ps, by its very nature and terminology, causes an organisation to focus internally, the authors reason.
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