Parkrun’s growth has been phenomenal. Their mission is “to transform health & happiness by empowering people to come together, to be active, social & outdoors.”  They want to reach more people. Commendable. They say critics don’t understand parkrun – it’s a community event not a race, they tell us. They see inactive or socially isolated people as the ones who need parkrun most. So it is important that people don’t fear that they will be too slow or will feel unwelcome.

Over the years the parkrun team have looked for ways to make it less intimidating for the inactive, with initiatives like tail walkers so a newcomer won’t be last, and parkwalk to legitimise the participation of people who don’t run at all. Notice that those are things that happen in real life, at the events – they are nothing to do with the published results. What matters is whether you turn up, and whether you have a good experience. That happens between 8.30 and 10am on a Saturday in a park. It’s likely that word of mouth is the biggest factor in getting people there, and volunteers being welcoming and tolerant of slowness determine whether nervous newbies come back.

Now parkrun says that “insight”, by which they probably mean market research, has told them that the statistics are a deterrent for those who are new to exercise. They want to “present data in a way that is not off-putting and doesn’t imply that parkrun is a race.” So they have removed course records, along with lists of who’s had most first finishes, sub-17 minute men and sub-20 minute women, and age grade or category records.

Will that help parkrun to keep growing? You had to look hard to find where the course records (male and female) were listed at the bottom of a page along with other stats for each parkrun. Hard to spot, unlike the ‘latest results’ page, which always has someone pretty fast (and male) in first place. Is that a deterrent? If it is, it’s still there. Seeing that someone else once ran it in 16 minutes is hardly relevant, though watching speedy runners can be quite exciting. Might not some people be motivated that they can be part of the same event as an Olympian?

What about the other information that’s now been hidden – fastest men and women, age-grade records and the rest. Newcomers to parkrun will have been completely unaware of those extra tabs on the website. Some parkrunners, on the other hand, find them interesting and motivating. There’s a Facebook group called parkrun statsgeek with thirteen thousand members. Most of them are pretty upset about the loss of access to the statistics. A poll shows 82% of them disagree with parkrun’s decision, 66% strongly. These are the people who run parkrun most weeks. Many of them are volunteers without whom the weekly events could not run.

In business terms, parkrun is prioritising non-customers over its most loyal customers. What’s more, it won’t address either of the issues that have triggered this change. Non-runners won’t have known about these lists but will still see the weekly results that look very much like race results. Meanwhile, the parkrun regulars feel they have lost something, and that they are not valued. From the Facebook statsgeek group:

“I tried to see most runs in my age group at Huddersfield. Including friends who are now in older age groups. Not a time thing. First time in 12 plus years I could not see anything. I feel robbed”

“My reading of the situation is that parkrun don’t want this kind of thing at their events so if my purpose for being there is to race or chase records then I am not welcome at their events.”

“I get really motivated and inspired by looking at performances from older females in my Age Cat and above.”

So to the elephant here. Parkrun was getting a lot of criticism for letting male runners who identify as women register as female, taking First Female finishes, age-grade records and female course records. Since the weekly results are not changing, this doesn’t change either. It’s just harder to track. Meanwhile the males registered as female (twenty or so in the UK) can continue to feature in the female placings.

Parkrun changed the product hoping to make it less unappealing to non-customers, but they have succeeded in upsetting many of their existing customers, especially the most committed, and there are certainly more than twenty of them. It has also made many more people aware of parkrun’s self-ID policy, which runners know is counter to that of World Athletics and UK Athletics because it is unfair to female runners. It’s even possible that for every non-runner who is pleased the stats have gone, there’s one who is deterred by an organisation that seems to put trans-identifying males before women.

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If revenue is under pressure, senior people often come up with ideas for the marketing team and get frustrated when they’re not acted on.

Let’s take an example. This marketer is in a medium-sized business facing revenue pressures because of Covid. Her function is fairly new, with not much history or information for her to work with. The sales team can’t answer her questions about where customers come from, what they value, and how to find and retain them. Starting to collect data on the customer base is essential. But right now, to others in the organisation this looks like digging foundations when the roof is leaking. Senior people are saying, never mind that, do some advertising! They don’t want to hear that such spending may be futile. But no one likes a naysayer, so how to handle that? Here’s my advice.

1. Embrace the short-term

Agree your short-term priorities, and what this means for other work. Schedule important things into Q2, Q3, Q4 … give yourself permission to park them until later.  Make sure your short-term focus is aligned with the business priorities. That way you can justify the things you are not doing – to yourself, as well as to others. If business priorities change, yours can too.

2. Put your helpful colleagues in the customer’s shoes

Lack of revenue is your problem, not the customer’s. Use customer-centric thinking to push back gently on those colleagues who think they know what you should be doing. Encourage them to imagine how it is to be a customer right now, what that customer is thinking and feeling, and what we can do to help them to buy. Those clamouring for price cuts may be right – but are there other barriers to purchase that need to be removed as well, or first, to enable prospects to buy? Your revenue problem is best addressed by identifying and addressing customer problems and needs.

3. Don’t take instruction – take direction

Sometimes it seems everyone’s a marketer. In response, work with them to agree the problem. Then engage them in the aspects they really know about. Find ways for them to be involved in the solution. In one case, Covid restrictions mean that a service business cannot show prospective customers around, leading to low lead conversion and a revenue shortfall. A senior person who’s demanding advertising can contribute by providing expert answers for an FAQ on the website, written or on video, to fill the gap left by being unable to meet customers in person.

4. Think big picture even for short term tasks

This doesn’t mean things that are important for the longer term have to be neglected. It means you will address them through specific examples. Feel your social media is a mess? Focus on how it can help with the short-term revenue problem. Make it work better for today’s priorities and build on that later.

Read more: Three ways to respond to pandemic uncertainty

How much of the change that’s been forced on us by the pandemic will stick?

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So, what should brands do in the Covid crisis? First, the things not to do:

1. Don’t assume you have to say anything

Maybe you should just save the money. Too many businesses seem to see this as a pretext to use their email database. Banks and retailers with whom I have the most tenuous connection – I can’t call it a relationship –  are emailing to reassure me they are here for me. So, apparently, is the motor dealership where I once bought a car. Cool, cool.

It’s a lot more public, and more expensive, for those brands seemingly competing for title of Most Vacuous on television, as demonstrated in this compilation.

2. Don’t make it about you (unless it is).

Believing advertising has an impact means accepting that its impact can be negative. It’s hard to advertise without making it about you, but in a crisis that’s not going to land well unless it’s really worth saying. Test that premise. Who needs to hear this message? Do they need it now? Can it be targeted to those who really need it rather than broadcast? Does it look self-serving if we say this now?

There are some things you can do

1. Be relevant

Top marks to John Lewis for emails that are both relevant and stimulating-  garden accessories, things you can put on your balcony, outdoor games. Tesco is advertising its early-morning opening hours which are restricted to NHS and social care workers. This is not virtue-signalling, it’s useful both to those who will be allowed in at that time and those who won’t.

Retailers and banks are emailing their access arrangements, which is marginally useful and not overly intrusive. Airlines telling me about their cleaning practices are less welcome – they could wait until I ask. I have yet to see a bank email me personally or as a business to tell us how we can apply for government assistance or a business support loan.

2. Remove friction

This is always a worthwhile goal. People love those little tweaks that make things easy. Sometimes people can tell you in research what they’d like, but humans are adaptable, so we tend to accept and accommodate rather than complain. Companies must challenge their own assumptions and processes. Apple is a master of this: unlocking a phone with a pin code seemed fine until we got fingerprint recognition. Then face ID made that feel like a faff.

There’s a clear divide between those businesses that have been proactive on behalf of customers and those that have maintained friction to protect short term revenue. Most gym groups automatically suspended membership when going to the gym became a proscribed activity. By contrast, even though pay-TV sport channels had no live sport to offer, Sky, Virgin Media and BT Sport waited for the customer to make the effort to cancel. Looking at direct competitors in the sector can give a false sense of security to businesses. Most customers only have one of those in our home; our comparisons are with brands in other sectors. It’s not a capability issue, either. Once live sport resumes Sky will automatically restart your subscription. Yes, taking your money is automated.

3. Be useful

Some businesses that can’t run as normal are doing impressive things, repurposing to serve key workers or to manufacture critical goods such as personal protective equipment. Some that can’t do this are donating hard cash. British Airways staff have been serving breakfast in uniform to NHS staff, which is a lovely stunt, cynical perhaps but still appealing, and garnering some good media coverage. It is tempting to announce whatever you’re doing. But you don’t have to tell everyone, right now. It may be something for shareholders, or people in the loyalty scheme. It might, in any case, be better to let someone else publicise your good work. Or wait to be asked. Or tell us after the crisis, when you have the full story.

On the other hand, some smaller businesses are seizing the moment to get attention. A sex fetish website called MedfetUK announced on Twitter that it had donated its stock of PPE for more conventional use during the pandemic. It’s not clear what they hope to gain, though. Surely this is relevant only to customers and potential customers – and for them it’s the unwelcome news that their favourite fetish items will be out of stock for the foreseeable.

4. Think long term

There is robust evidence that advertising in a recession builds brand value which pays back when the economy recovers. But perhaps the most important opportunity, available to even the most cash-strapped business, is to use the time to rethink. Marketing is not just communications, after all. Revisit those hefty seminal pieces of work like market segmentation that can yield gems if you have the luxury of time to explore them. Look again at the fundamentals of your brand, your category, your business model. Finally, we are free from running from meeting to meeting. What a chance to innovate.

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There are some areas of business where there are right or best ways to do things, such as operational safety, legal and regulatory compliance, cyber-security. Marketing has its own best practices, in the principles of strategic marketing: understanding and segmenting the market, knowing the target customer and how to create value for them, delivering on the expectation set up by the proposition and brand. Those principles are just as relevant in a digital world. But these shouldn’t be confused with an actual proposition, or a brand’s look and feel; these are brand-specific.

As digital marketers rise to become the marketing leaders in their businesses, there is a growing tension. Non-marketers will naturally value the digital native advocating best practice in the brave new digital world. But so-called best practice is no substitute for brand strategy. Applied in the wrong places, it dampens down personality and flattens a brand’s distinctive voice into a monotone. It stifles proposition development and communication, tending to generic output when something distinctive may be more effective. Best practice can kill innovation stone dead. If everyone is copying everyone else, how does anything new appear? If Steve Jobs had followed industry best practice, we might all still be logging in on a DOS screen.

Here are the warning signs that digital marketing’s voice may be too loud in your business:

Website design that is based largely on how others do it, rather than what users of your website need and want. Counter this with user journeys. They prompt everyone to think about the needs of the various types of people who may visit the site, including current and potential customers and others like media and investors.

Calls to action everywhere on the website, especially the same CTA. Digital marketers are often measured on lead generation but a website is not a brochure or a sales pitch to potential customers. Nor will a sophisticated buyer be impressed. If I’m browsing in a clothes shop, I don’t want someone constantly at my shoulder saying, like to try anything on? This is easily solved with tailored landing pages for lead gen campaigns; there’s no need for the website to seek to ensnare the idle browser (or current client, or curious investor, or future employee) at every turn.

Marketing planning conversations that aren’t about customers or different user needs. Colleagues who are driven by lead generation tend to be single-minded about getting short term measurable outcomes. This can compromise the building of trust with prospects. It may also be at the expense of other audiences who matter to the long term success of the business. A customer-centred approach will help you find common ground.

Pointing to direct competitors as the key justification for recommendations. Fear Of Missing Out is not a strategy. Other brands’ choices are interesting and informative but unless their strategy is the same as yours they are not a reliable guide.

Try these simple rules to stay on track:

Have your own brand personality and tone of voice, and use it as a reference across everything. Bearing in mind, of course, that brand-building is not an end in itself – the goal is effective customer connection, not self-expression.

Speak the customer’s language not your own. In b2b, use their generic industry terms not yours. Prospective customers are experts in their business, not in ours. So we need to get into their world, and speak their language. For example, a software provider to the HR sector needs to speak HR language so as to connect with primary decision-makers, who will be HR people not IT experts.

Go where your customers are. Best practice steers you to focus on what competitors are doing. A brand-centric approach dares you to be different. Combine this with customer-centric thinking and go to their industry events, not your own. Don’t worry about where your competitors are. This can deliver tactical advantage – you may find you’re the only one of your type in a sea of potential clients.

Copy if it saves you reinventing something where it’s ok to be the same as everyone else. Some digital marketing best practice is valuable. Generic industry-standard language is essential for search engine optimisation, for strong natural search results – bearing in mind it’s the search terms clients and prospects use that matter, not what the experts say. Some standardisation of a site such as icons, and perhaps navigation, can make sense if they’re familiar to your customers and prospects. That means referencing their world, not just your direct competitors’ activity.

Don’t copy in any area where differentiation matters. If innovation seeks the next big idea, best practice leads to conformity. If you’re aiming to create an exciting new flavour, don’t end up vanilla.

The golden rule: Set up your marketing communications and interfaces to enable customers to get what they need, not what you want them to do. If you’ve followed marketing best practice, your proposition will give them what they need, and they’ll click on the Call me button, not out of frustration but because they want it.

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These are important social issues that play out in the workplace. Businesses need to have clear policies, and some people, especially employees and investors, want to know where they stand. But for the most part customers don’t care. This is not marketing.

But shouldn’t brands use their reach, their budgets and their influence for good? Yes, and there are many ways to do this, not all of them with that unflattering bandwagon look. It’s risky, too. Unless the brand is living the values it will emerge as inauthentic. It’s not just the glaringly obvious gaffes like Pepsi’s with Kendall Jenner. Some say that Airbnb is contributing to making life miserable for many social housing tenants who find themselves living next to party flats in big cities because it won’t cooperate with councils to reduce illegal and frequent subletting. Yet the affected tenants may well be the poor, recently-arrived people Airbnb’s inclusive stance purports to embrace. Paperchase ended up looking totally unprincipled recently when it denounced its chosen promotional partner, the Daily Mail, in the face of criticism of the Mail’s politics, which were surely not a surprise revelation.

Brands are a shorthand for a set of values, sure, but first they’re a signal of an offer, something that fulfils a purpose. That purpose is usually mundane and personal. It’s fashionable to reach for a world-changing purpose, but that’s no substitute for meeting a consumer need. Brands can have both but relying on the altruistic one is for charities and other “good causes”. The rest of the world wants something for their money. Employees want to know their work is worthwhile but that can be about little things that are helpful or enjoyable – it doesn?t have to be changing the world. Besides, satisfaction at work comes in many forms, with simple recognition perhaps the most important. People leave bad bosses more than bad jobs.

In these turbulent times it’s worth remembering that virtue-signalling brands are nothing new. Likewise brands that try to shock – think Benetton – or to campaign on political issues. It works when brands choose their own agenda, and set it out proactively. Cosmetics retailer Lush got into trouble this year for its spy cops campaign, which really has nothing to do with its products. Contrast that with The Body Shop, which was driven by issues of sustainability and fairness forty years ago. It was built into their sourcing, product development and distribution practices, not just a few radical tweets and ads. This was true brand activism, and it has lasted. The outdoor brand Patagonia encourages people to repair their garments rather than replace them; it has earned the right to comment on environmental issues, sometimes very boldly. By contrast, the new wave of brand activism seems to be about ensuring the brand is not open to criticism by failing to endorse social issues. As we saw with Paperchase, this can really get your wrapping paper in a twist, because there’s no pleasing everyone.

“There’s no pleasing everyone” is of course a sound starting point for any brand to position itself and create a marketing strategy. It’s the basis of market segmentation, which is still a marketer’s best friend. A brand that is confident of its target market and how it is relevant to them doesn’t have to worry about other people. Focus and consistency will win out over virtue-signalling in the long run.

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This tells us one thing for sure, and a couple of maybes. For sure, this looks like a level of flexibility being permitted in local markets that has not been seen since the sacred formula was standardised and the syrup production process centralised. (Although there has been improvisation when needs must – see chapter 13 of “For God Country and Coca Cola” on how wartime production problems in Nazi Germany led to the creation of Fanta. So much for strategic, consumer-needs-led innovation.)

The maybes are a bigger deal. Maybe sugar is now demonised to the point where it’s on a par with alcohol. No longer an innocent, universal source of joy, and Coke a unifying force for happiness. Instead, a route to pleasure but not a trouble-free one. The second maybe is this: the people who run Coca Cola are worried. In some countries sugar is now taxed, as alcohol and tobacco are. This is on the rise. What a shock for soft drinks executives to find they could be in the same business – selling addictive substances that can cause health problems. Tobacco companies have created vaping brands as part of their alternative lines of business. The big players in branded alcohol have diversified and added low alcohol and soft drinks. It’s a wake-up call for any business reliant on sugar if the mighty Coca Cola Company thinks alcohol is a good direction for diversification. At the very least, this means that an alcopop is no longer off-limits for a soft drinks company. What used to be across a great divide is now on a continuum.

We have seen signs of this, with the rise and fall of fruit juice and smoothies. PepsiCo owns Tropicana, the market leader in orange juice in the USA, a big OJ market. Coca Cola bought UK-based Innocent Smoothies. Both used to see these as natural, healthy additions to their portfolios; a defensive play when carbonated soft drinks were under attack. For a time, consumers thought it too. But in recent years fruit juice volume sales have fallen faster in Europe than fizzy drinks have.

It’s too soon to say that Coca Cola is moving into the alcoholic drinks business. They say it’s only Japan. But look at it another way: Japan is a nicely-confined market, without much exporting of local products into other markets. It’s also a hotbed of product innovation, in which drinks come and go fast. In other words, it’s a great place to run a controlled experiment. If you think your main ingredient is becoming a liability, you look for other ways to leverage your assets and capabilities: canning liquids and getting them out to buyers via perhaps the world’s most successful distribution network. I’m betting there’ll be another such experiment happening somewhere else soon.

If this is a sign of a shift away from monolithic brands and a one-size-fits-all approach to product development, that’s nice for people who work at Coke, interesting for a few industry observers, and largely irrelevant to the rest of us. If it’s an indication of how far the image of sugar has fallen, that has much wider implications.

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In a sense, the entire industry is being repositioned.

The problem British Airways and others are facing is that they are letting one class of travel – indeed, one aspect of that class – define their entire brand. Since brand perceptions tend to linger, there’s a risk we will hear the barrage of negative messages about service slipping, without changing the belief they’re a little more expensive. For them, that’s the worst of all possible options.

Until recently, many airlines pretended that most of their passengers would be treated like royalty, and that the experience of flying with them would be like the golden era of Concorde. This is just not credible. Anyway, we all know the reality is different. There has to be a trade-off between price and service. So, with budget carriers covering the bottom end, traditional airlines made the mistake of thinking that meant they had to be the experience people. For years, they tried to persuade us that free drinks and assigned seats made it worth paying more to fly the flag.

That hasn’t really worked, at least not on short haul. Flying has got cheaper. People fly more. It’s not special. It’s no longer part of the holiday, just a means to an end. So, having tried and largely failed to persuade people the experience was worth paying more for, flagship carriers are cutting service corners to be more like the no-frills carriers.

This looks like a sensible response to a competitive marketplace – as long as they also use their biggest advantage. Unlike the budget carriers, the flagship airlines have a tiered offer within the plane – they can provide choices the no-frills guys can’t. If, like British Airways, the same route can be travelled in two, three or even four different classes, then they must use the entry level to compete with the budget airlines, and let higher fares and classes of travel offer the superior flying experience.

Businesses have to segment their offering, because not everyone wants to pay the same. Without a clearly tiered offer, we can’t choose between low price and indulgent experience. Airlines segment like mad through yield management, with all those different fare classes. But it’s an internal process – resulting in people paying different prices for the same product. Happy the business that segments its target market well, creates differentiated offers, suitably priced, and signals those propositions clearly so that customers can pay for what they care about most and make the right choices for them. Tesco, for all its woes, does this well. You know exactly where you are with its Value, Tesco and Finest ranges, each clear and unapologetic about what you get for what you pay. BA and its ilk should do the same. Cut even more in economy, and make it even better in business class. That’s giving the traveller a real choice.

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There are three options to protect margins.

1. Make it smaller. But don’t expect to get away with it. Recent casualties: Mr Kipling and Toblerone. It’s easier with categories like cereals, crisps, dry petfood, where the contents aren’t counted, and don’t have to fit the pack precisely. Someone always spots it though, and it never goes down well. I suspect the Toblerone move is driven by extreme pragmatism – downsizing the product without changing the pack dimensions, which would affect packaging, production lines, maybe distribution. The trouble is that it has changed the consumer experience for the worse. The internal voices of operations and finance seem to have trumped the voice of the consumer, creating not just a value problem but a change of product experience. Mr Kipling’s taking some media flack, but the chocolate slices are the same, just one less in the pack, as stated on the box. Sometimes the hidden price increase is a sensible option that minimises other costs. Be open about it. You won’t be alone this year, but if feels like a con if you don’t front it up.

2. Make it cheaper. Adjust recipes and formulas, put pressure on suppliers, find cheaper suppliers or cheaper ingredients. Sophisticated businesses do this anyway, so more gains are not easy to find. The more you know what really delivers the brand experience, the better chance of saving money without delivering less than the brand promises. Be careful of unintended consequences – for example, replacing a good quality food ingredient with something that makes the product less healthy, in consumers’ eyes. Or the salami-slicing effect of changing the product little by little over time. Eventually it just won’t be as good as it used to be. Remember the Pizza Express “shrinking pizza” controversy of 2002? It was never fully resolved, but at least the pizzas got bigger; appetite, if not curiosity, was satisfied.

3. Put the price up. This is going to happen a lot this year. Unilever got pushed back on Marmite by Tesco, who saw an opportunity to act as a consumer champion – but you can bet Tesco wasn’t sharing the pain of increased costs. Short term revenue may suffer, especially if competitors don’t follow. But it is honest, and people will understand why it’s happening. It has the virtue of maintaining both brand and product integrity, and won’t damage trust.

There is a fourth option, which is to suck it up. Don’t mess with the product or the price. Protect the consumer experience and value for money, not your margins. It’s not an option for everyone. Absorbing higher costs will hit the business in its pocket. But if competitors are messing about with an eye on the short term, as above, your brand could be the winner, in volume in the near term and loyalty in the longer term. Companies with a portfolio may hedge their bets with a range of responses across different brands. It’s a real test of short term vs long term orientation.

What about businesses where the pricing is not transparent – services, such as insurance, or anything subscription-based? The temptation there is to try to hold the line, and give in with secret discounts only to customers who threaten to leave. We all know this goes on – motor insurance, roadside rescue and pay TV services are notorious for it. It’s good for short term revenue, but can cause harm when it gets out. It also changes the customer interaction from a potential relationship to a game of cat and mouse. It’s an option, but don’t talk about loyalty or brand love.

Brands are supposed to help people make choices. If your brand takes advantage of the customers who trust it, or if it requires a lot of customer effort to get a fair deal, it may be time to think again. You have options. Just check you’re not messing up the customer experience through an inferior product or undermining their trust.

People scoffed when ticket inspectors on the train became revenue protection officers. But it’s honest. As you make difficult calls this year, make sure you’re still a brand manager and not just a revenue protection officer.

The post Don’t do a Toblerone. Here are your options. appeared first on Clearhound.

This happened years ago but it stuck with me, because of what it shows about how we see the world. As Mark Twain said, “It ain’t what you don?t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Now think about what you know for sure about your market, your customers, your business, your brand. Was it ever, really, so? Is it still so? Things change – and that creates opportunities.

Think of the familiar gripes you hear in focus groups. Or from friends. I’d pay more to get it faster, to have it delivered, for someone to assemble it for me, not to have to wait in line. Why can’t I have it cheaper? Make a simpler version, it’s all I need. It?s easy to dismiss as the same old stuff people always say, before you get to the good stuff, the real purpose of the research, the thing you want to hear about – a new product, maybe, or some new advertising, or a new pack design.

But to other people, that throwaway warm-up chat is gold dust. Why? Because it inspires disruptive innovation. While the established airlines were refining their in-flight food and entertainment to justify the prices people were complaining about, South West and Easyjet and Ryanair got rid of it all, to give people cheap air travel. While Ford and GM offered ever-bigger discounts on new cars, ZipCar dispensed with car ownership altogether, realising some people don’t care about cars, they just want to be able to get around.

Ford and GM’s biggest barrier was their current business model. Those huge production lines have to be kept running. The main job of marketers is to help fill them. Who in Ford is going to champion an idea that might shut some of them down? By proposing a radical alternative to the current business, you’re betting against the company – what Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen calls “the innovator’s dilemma”. You could call it career suicide.

Most businesses are alive to this challenge now. You just have to say “Eastman Kodak” – who held patents for digital photography but didn’t want to harm their film business. There are solutions for the innovator’s dilemma, like separate innovation teams, or running parallel competing businesses, or by being watchful of upstarts and buying them. Zipcar was acquired not by a motor manufacturer but by Avis car rental.

But what if you don’t even know you’re filtering out the awkward realities? That’s the Santa Claus effect. Are we seeing the world as it is, or as we believe it to be? That’s where marketers have a critical job to do. It’s our responsibility to listen, without fear or prejudice, and to share what we hear. There’s plenty of talk about bringing the voice of the customer into the organisation, and even into the boardroom. Our challenge is to make sure it’s the true, uncensored voice, not the convenient voice. If you can do that, your business may not get everything it wants for Christmas. But there’s a good chance it will live happily ever after.

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