Small is the new big

One thing the recession is bringing with it is a sense that rampant consumerism isn’t working at the moment. One of the disadvantages of consumerism is the fact that one has so many customers that they become statistics and stop being people.

Just to provide an example. Recently I have had some dealings with our bank. It involved signing some paperwork. Our account has been open with them for over four years.

The paperwork had to be sent through to us and and a second lot would need to be signed at the bank. I was assured that the second lot of paperwork would be at a branch near us when calling in.

When we took batch number one of papers to the bank to sign I requested the second set of papers. However the branch had not received any papers and assured us that this was all that had to be signed. I asked three times.

I checked up on all of this ten days later and discovered that we still had to sign further papers said papers having been routed to the branch the account had been opened at. We live about 260 miles away from this branch. It’s not convenient to pop in to sign anything!

The number of times documents or new cards have gone back to the original branch are practically uncountable. I have not been able to have a permanent change of address included in our profile. Impossible.

And there is nothing one can do. Because between the one person one speaks to and the next it gets lost in translation that all stuff needs to go to Brighton instead of Leeds.

Nobody, neither the person at the end of the telephone at phone banking or at the branch is able to make a decision on anything.

Consumerism has lead to this huge drive to get more and more customers with an attitude that if one customer is unhappy and leaves then so what. That attidue does nothing for a great customer experience.

The thinking is that we’ll just get loads more consumers by running another TV commercial or full-page spread ad in the newspapers.

But it’s not working anymore. TV and the print media have discovered that their advertising revenue is shriveling away. The reason for this? Companies have seen a dwindling return on investment on their adspend. With other words people are not buying anymore, regardless of the frequency of commercials.

How are you going to get those customers back? It’s certainly not going to work by throwing money at social media and online advertising in the hope these will bring back the glory days of consumerism even if all so-called social media experts shriek this from the roof tops.

In fact social media could be incredibly dangerous for most of the big companies targeting the consumer goods market. Why is that? Because social media encourages word of mouth and word of mouth is a killer if the product is not up to scratch.

What to do then? It’s really easy. Get closer to the customer again. Be a friend, a confidant, a supporter and a fan of your customer and he will come back. Make him feel important again.

If your company is too big to be able to do that, you will need to get smaller, more agile, more real. Bear that in mind when building your own company. Bigger is not better. Better is better.