Don’t Shoot at Customers

Customers are not targets. We are not shooting at them. Yet, I think many interactive marketing folks get sucked into this mindset. With this view, customers are little more than numbers or metrics, which makes manipulative tactics for short-term gain all the more tempting. For instance, Tagged.com used questionable tactics to up its user base. Tagged.com mined its existing users’ e-mail address books and sent invitations to those people without any consent. The cost of annoying users by violating their privacy likely outweighed any increase in its user base. Also, the quality of its user base gained—the likelihood that the new users would ever use Tagged.com—probably was low. Metrics are important, to be sure, but focusing ONLY on metrics and forgetting that customers are people can mean disaster.

To help avoid this manipulative mindset, we need to

• Think of customers as people—even if we can’t look them in the eye.
• View marketing to customers less as aiming messages at targets and more as building relationships with them.
• Focus on long-term benefits, not short-term gains.

For more on this topic, see my article Winning Content Persuades, Not Manipulates.