Changing customer behaviour?

I am in bed with some sort of flu at the mo. so catching up on a little reading (in between sleeping!).

In the Spring issue of the Marketing Society’s Market Leader magazine, David Cowan of Forensics, a strategic growth consultancy writes:

Marketing’s proximate mission must be to change customer behaviour – it is customer behaviour change that leads to top line growth. Changing customer behaviour is the link that connects the CEO and finance directors requirements with marketing.

and later…

Changing customer behaviour should be formally set as the header objective because it gives direction to the whole marketing enterprise.

Sorry David, I just can’t get with this at all.

Imagine you knew one of your suppliers had its objective to change your behaviour – what would your reaction be? I certainly know what mine would be and it is not suited to a family blog like this! As a customer, I have no interest in changing to suit a company’s needs – only to suit my own.

Indeed, I’ll go further. A responsive supplier would change it’s behaviour to meet my needs and aspirations not the other way round.

Of course, the best relationships are the result of conversation or co-creation. Change often takes place as part of this discussion – sometimes on one side only, but most successfully on both. Customer success (and the supplier’s long term aspirations) are won through dialog, understanding, education and common ground.

IMO they are never won through suppliers coaxing customers to do things that they neither want to do nor are in their longer term interests.

PS. I have mailed David about this post to give him the chance to respond in the comments.

Comments

[David Cowan]

Dear Freddie

While I don't want my comment to come over aggressively what I wrote in Market Leader has been completely misinterpreted and misunderstood. I was certainly not suggesting that suppliers should arrogantly demand that customers fit the way they do business to make life easier for suppliers. What I was writing about concerned the end-objective of marketing which is to increase profitable revenue. The customer behaviour change I was talking about was the purchasing or usage behaviour change that leads to increased revenue.

Your comment says: "A responsive supplier would change it's behaviour to meet my needs and aspirations not the other way around". Absolutely. The responsive supplier changes its behaviour in order to either gain new brand users or increase frequency of use or increase the loyalty of its customers. Of course more than one of these may pertain. Marketing needs to be clear, but often isn't, about which purchasing and usage behaviour change it seeks to bring about. It then needs to identify the variables that need to change that will bring this about and how these variables should be used.

Behaviour change is what marketing is all about yet it is not even mentioned in the Marketing Society's manifesto - this is what my short article was saying.

DAVID COWAN

07957-323-569

Forensics
PO Box 38290
LONDON
NW3 1XZ

[Ty]

Human behavior is human behavior. It cannot be changed, it is immutable. If you want to influence someone's actions (i.e.: to buy) you have to work within the framework of their existing behavioral tendancies. This is pure science. For example, people arrive at all decisions based on a process of elimination, including buying decisions. That means the marketer's mandate is to facilitate the decision-making process...to "shepard consumer behavior."

That's the trouble with words. I believe you and Freddie are saying the same thing--you just used the wrong words.