Quote:
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ust treat people how you want to be treated, listen to them
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This is called the golden rule. It's trite, simplistic, and except in the rare case where you are the customer (almost never) a recipe for marketing disaster.
Software and web developers are notorious for using the "the customer is just like us" to foist off the very worst interface designs on users. For within this seeming wisdom is the ingredient for mischief: If I'm just like you, what need have I to do any research, user testing, or find out about your special circumstances or needs?
None. None at all. And companies seize on that to slash user research and marketing budgets.
Worst of all, it's in direct conflict with helping people get what they want. You have to find out what people want before you can give it to them. And with all due respect to the names dropped in the OP, what they don't say is rule number one: Marketing starts when you assume you are not the customer. Because then you are in the proper frame of mind to listen to the customer with the intent of
getting to know your customer.
The next largest segment is the company who thinks the customer and user is a blithering idiot. Witness the marketing flops of Microsoft Bob and "Clippy," the unhelpfully helpful cartoon paperclip in Office.
These companies say "we listen." They use listening to allow the irate customer to blow off steam, while nothing changes. They listen, but nothing that isn't from the company's own self interest and self obsession
is actually heard.
Once again, the seductive premise is the customer is an unwanted intrusion into the company talking to itself, about itself, like a wacked-out street person. And it is from that disturbing lack of inquiry into the customer most services and products are designed.
Want to let someone know -- really know -- you want them to get what they want? Try appreciative inquiry into their world view. Show you share that world view.
And then you will get what you want.
Is it rocket science? No. But it is a vanishing small little effort. You have to develop some interest in someone outside yourself. And that, sad to say, makes it distasteful for the lazy narcissists gobbling down pablum dressed up in the golden rule.
Marketers (the real ones) understand the platinum rule trumps the golden rule. The Platinum Rule teaches us to treat others the way they want to be treated. That's marketing. And the realization common sense is anything but common.