As customers, we do not have a monopoly on the truth, although we always have the power to decide, to choose whether to approve or reject, to return or leave, to recommend or not, to repeat or discard.
I believe that the power of the customer is enormous, and because of this, we promote success with our preference, business and loyalty. However, I also think that it is a limited power, since it is not enough to always be right.
If he had been a regular customer in the advertising world, Steve Jobs would have asked to pre-test the most famous commercial in history: 1984. In the hyper-rationalization of the wonderfully emotional, many great ideas are stranded in the absence of courageous creative minds. Let’s see what happens when the client seeks to be right, and asks for a focus group to evaluate creative ideas from your agency.
We’ll see a recreation of the 1984 commercial in story-board, the typical description used for a real focus group, with the comments people made in a session and the resulting conclusions. This is an example in the advertising world that confirms it: the client is not always right.
Often, as a client, we forget that people are intelligent and we want to explain everything to them. With some regularity we decree absolutes in the territory of the relative. The fact that we have the right of approval or rejection does not give us the right of reason. We often forget that we are essentially emotion.
Authority is not truth, and therefore, as clients, we must listen to nature, listen twice as much and speak half as much, focusing on getting the most out of each specialist as well as the greatest contribution from each expert. Creativity requires space, daring, long-sightedness and intuition.
As a client, I am obliged to be concerned that what I do is business, looking for a fair relationship between what I pay and what I receive. If I am only looking for my own gain in a transaction, I am not going to achieve a relationship for sure. In this context, the customer has the immense power to get the maximum potential, to ignite the spirits and provoke the imagination, because his desire is only the best, what had not been dreamed possible, before others achieve it instead.
Had it been for a traditional client, 1984 would never have been the success it was, despite being aired only once at the Superbowl. Here is the commercial that would have been destroyed had it been for the focus group and artificial lab opinions.
I am a client every day, and I serve clients every day. Internal customers and external customers, customers of all types, sizes and tastes. However, there is no better customer than one that inspires its people to give the maximum in each one, that listens, recognizes and embraces, that demands and summarizes, that compensates adequately, that squeezes but does not suffocate.
The recipes of the past may not work today. What got us here will not get us there. It is no longer only an extraordinary creative, an extraordinary design and an extraordinary production that is needed, because the times also demand an extraordinary product, an extraordinary service and an extraordinary customer.
When I give myself as a client and place my trust, I receive commitment and redoubled attention. When I am picky and distrustful, when I get involved in everything and put pressure on every detail, even in those areas that are not my specialty or are of my total ignorance, I receive only what I give and not all that I could receive.
The client who forgets the talent of the people he hires loses, and the hired loses because he does not express his full potential. The client who understands that the only thing he has is the gigantic power of approval or rejection, but not the power of truth, wins. I like the client who knows that he gains more if he joins the team and focuses on synergizing. I like the customer who has the power of no as well as the power of yes.
Look at what a customer like Microsoft would have done if they had been the one designing the packaging for a Mac. Of course this is a parody and is nothing more than a way to inspire the client to focus on everything but more of the same.
