Thinking like a customer is in fashion again

The be great at marketing, you must learn to think like a customer. Great companies excel at this skill. One of the examples I have used in my books and papers is the Proctor and Gamble of old. Proctor and Gamble themselves were great marketers and innovators because they could and would think like a customer. Unfortunately, some of their more recent successors either never learned the importance of the skill or felt they could short-circuit the process with enough “market data.”

 

I am thrilled to see that in A.G. Lafley’s (the CEO of P&G) new book, Game Changer, he cites as one of his principles the need to “keep the customer at the center of all our decisions.” You may remember that A.G.’s promotion to CEO of P&G was met with skepticism … to say the least. (The stock price plummeted on the announcement that he was going be CEO). You may also note that his tenure as CEO has seen a turn-around in P&G’s fortunes and an increase in their stock price.

 

To insure that his people re-learned to think like a customer he has instituted several programs that require R&D and marketing people to spend time out with customers rather than conducting focus groups or other artificial research environments.

 

Isn’t amazing what the simple act of great marketing can do for a company. If you can remember to think like the customer rather than hope the customer thinks like you, your company, product line or division will go far.

 

Mitch

Is It Safe To Fly?

Since I fly a lot, people have asked me a bunch of questions about the current American Airlines maintenance debacle. Questions have ranged from “do you feel safe flying” to “how can they do this to their customers.” As you might expect, I have lots of thoughts on these topics.

 

First, yes I do feel safe flying. The airline industry has an impeccable and improving safety record. In addition, pilots have a self-preservation motive to make sure the planes they fly on are safe too.

 

However, the customer issue is a whole different thing. American Airlines instituted a policy last year that no longer allows customers to talk to them about ANYTHING that is not current flight related. If you have a question, feedback, complaint or issue you have to email it to them. And their email response is no where close to prompt in my experience.

 

However this policy has probably done one thing for them. They have found an effective way to reduce customer complaints.

 

Regarding the current debacle, who knows. I have found that most airlines operate as if passengers are an inconvenience to the efficient movement of airplanes. And, since most of the airlines benchmark their performance against each other, the bar is not very high.

 

The better airlines, like Southwest (who was also caught cutting maintenance corners) are usually full and a full airplane is less comfortable than a ½-full airplane. So, flying on the other airlines can have its advantages when they are not full.

 

However, now that the “majors’ (not that Southwest is not a major, but Jet Blue certainly isn’t) are reducing flights, their flights are full too, so their benefit over Southwest has been reduced. And with Southwest if you buy a business fare or if you fly them a lot, you can guarantee yourself an aisle or window as you prefer no matter when you book.

 

Anyway, as long as the employees of the airlines hate their management, and airline management operates as if customers don’t matter, nothing is going to change no matter what the lawmakers try to do. Safety is not really an issue in my opinion, and you can’t legislate good service. The market has to demand good service, and since the airlines appear to have banded together to remove that it makes it tough for the traveler in normal times, much less with the current debacle.

 

 Mitch

It’s not about the people, it’s about the process

As we teach in our Lean Marketing Workshops, lack of results is usually a failure of process not people. Deming reported that fact many years ago.

We have been reading Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, & Total Nonsense and found the authors have identified additional research that further supports this truth. One example they cite is the old General Motors plant in Fremont, CA.

That plant was closed in 1982 because it was one of the worst GM plants in the country as measured by defects per car built and cost per car built. The plant also suffered from wildcat strikes and “rampant drug and alcohol abuse.” The plant was re-opened in 1985 as a joint venture between GM and Toyota, but it instituted the Toyota Production System (called Lean Manufacturing or Lean Thinking outside of Toyota).

85% of the initial workforce consisted of rehired former GM employees. The first year the plant produced cars, its output was among the highest quality and lowest cost cars produced in any plant in the U.S. Same people, new process, better results.

And least our senior management readers get too smug, the authors also note that Toyota is the ONLY automobile company where changing the CEO has had NO impact on company performance. In other words, the processes the company uses are so robust, there is little noticeable effect on the company due to any single person change … even the CEO.

They just keep relentlessly moving to #1 in revenue and profit.

Mitch