Blind Spot. Nathan Shedroff

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СКАЧАТЬ most companies have no such luxury. If Comcast were a neighborhood restaurant, it wouldn’t last more than a few months. Within days of opening, anyone who went there would tell everyone else to stay away.

      In fact, most small businesses understand that their customers have a series of experiences that turn into a relationship. They know that developing positive relationships is critical to their success. They have to learn their customers’ names, understand their preferences, and know what their customers want before they say so. Their business has to be positive, upbeat, and sensitive. Being good at what they do simply isn’t enough. They have to know how to give and take in a two-way conversation. They have to care.

      Blind Spots and Opportunities

      You’ll find that this is just one of many blind spots that businesses have. In Comcast’s case, short-term profit is much more important than long-term relationships, and holding customers prisoner is the only acceptable corporate strategy. Comcast prefers to incentivize management and front-line employee alike to make it nearly impossible for customers to leave (although, ultimately, it’s no more difficult than a call to their credit card company to cancel the account) than to give its customers a reason to want to be customers for the long term.

      This is just one way in which traditional business thinking has blinded its practitioners to reality. Relationships are the source of long-term value, not merely because it’s easier to keep an existing customer than to acquire a new one, but because satisfied customers help a business acquire new ones.

      It’s really no different than personal relationships. While the healthy relationships you forge with friends and family are built more on emotional and meaningful value, the same is still true of relationships built on financial and functional value. For some strange reason, businesspeople have been told that only the short-term, financial value is worth building, but any wise businessperson knows this isn’t the case. Still, traditional business literature is rife with this contradiction.

      Broadly speaking, everyone has at least some blind spots. This reference indicates an area of the retina (the inside back of your eyeballs), which has no light-sensitive rods and cones because it’s where all of the other optic nerves flow out of the eye and into the brain. This creates a small disc in your field of view that has no actual information, although your brains are facile in filling in the missing signals with assumed data that makes it seem like you’re getting a complete, seamless picture of our surroundings. You don’t really notice that you’re not really seeing some of the data around you.

      Likewise, organizations often have blind spots that they don’t notice because their managements “fill in” what’s missing with alternative perspectives, or they ignore missing data because they can’t make sense of it themselves. Unfortunately, this process is often filled in with dogma and not experience. Unlike what our brains are capable of doing, these blind spots cause companies to miss important cues, obscure lucrative opportunities, and assume they have the complete picture when they’re leaving dollars on the table, because they never see what they don’t look for.

      The blind spot we’re most interested in here has to do with what contributes to companies’ total value, namely, the building of relationships with customers Without seeing relationships for what they are—a mutual appreciation built on sequences of pleasing customer experiences over time—organizations miss what is often the single most important opportunity to build their total value (see Chapter 2, “Defining a Business Relationship,” for more information).

      Relationships and Opportunities

      What defines a relationship with a company instead of another person? Put simply, it’s a connection with a company that someone values. You can use a product to do a task, but for many of the things you own and use, you don’t value them beyond their functions. A relationship is different. It grows out of the customer’s interactions with your company. It can be quite strong and even have human dimensions, and it’s an opportunity for a company to create a long-term customer.

      Such a definition may seem strange or overstated, but research has shown that people see and react to brands and businesses much as they do to other people. In the 1990s, for example, Stanford researchers Cliff Nass and Byron Reeves found that users of devices such as computers and microwave ovens often treated these objects as if they were human. In other words, they used a shorthand with these objects that granted them a kind of “virtual personhood.”¹ Everyone knows that a microwave isn’t a person, nor a computer, but it’s much easier to treat it as if it were—and to expect the same treatment, in kind. This grants the device (or company) the permission to have and express emotions, personalities, and even agency—but only as long as it acts like like a decent human being. The moment the company crosses the social boundaries of acceptable behavior (like ignoring your pleas to cancel your service), the same power that builds brand value allows it to be destroyed—even faster. That colleague you trust at work, that you treat with respect? Once you find him to be a purposeful impediment to your own tasks, he’s no longer an ally but an adversary—or even an enemy. This is the nature of human relationships, and it’s the same with how you expect devices, services, and organizations to behave. The value you grant them (or revoke) is entirely built on the relationships you build.

      In a ground-breaking study in 1998, Susan Fournier (a noted management scholar and researcher on brand value) argued that brands and customers do forge meaningful relationships. The reason is fairly simple. We’re human, and as humans, it’s what we do. We grow up learning how to forge relationships with other people. When we interact with products or companies, we default to what comes naturally.

      Of course, products and companies aren’t people. It may not make sense to love Disney, or you may be disappointed that the creator of a mobile device espouses a cause you dislike, but it happens. You might get angry and frustrated at a vending machine. You possibly love shoes or one of your home appliances. You may feel like you’re greeting an old friend returning from a trip abroad when you crack open your favorite soda. It’s how humans make sense of the complex world around them. It’s just how we are.

      Unfortunately, most companies don’t understand this tactic and don’t invest in relationships, at least not in a continuous, strategic way. It’s easy to understand why. Relationships are fuzzy, not easily measured, and they mean different things to different people. Marketers talk about them, but few businesses treat them as strategic assets. Walk into a boardroom, and you can get a long way talking about income statements, P&L, CapEx, and ROI. Talk about relationships, and few people want to listen, especially if the business isn’t doing well. When challenged, there’s not yet any way to point to the value of relationships in an organization’s financials because the value is spread throughout all of the statements. It doesn’t feel real, but it’s encapsulated everywhere a company does business. Relationships don’t seem real or concrete enough to act upon. They’re seen as a byproduct of other activities, something that happens on their own as long as you take care of other things.

      For most businesses, relationships are a major factor in building what’s known as premium value. Premium value indicates how much more a customer would pay for one product or service over an equivalent replacement. A relationship-conscious company like Disney can charge much more per visit to its parks than Six Flags. Coke sells for more than generic soda. And Apple can charge much more than its rivals for products that do much the same thing.

      You might think we’re merely talking about one product being better than another. That’s not the entire story, though, as good relationships start with products that work. But functionality is table stakes these days, and premium brands don’t stress functional attributes. Almost any company СКАЧАТЬ