For the last few years, you should have notice a new type of customer is rising on the Web. This new type of customer is becoming more and more immune to marketing happy talk and demands facts not fiction.
Too much marketing and advertising treats the customer like a sucker. By cleverly manipulating our core emotions, advertising gets us to buy products that are never quite what they seem. (Have you ever seen a car advertisement shot in rush hour traffic?)
Of course, marketing is not entirely to blame here. The consumer is nearly always a sucker to complexity in the store, while cursing its lack of simplicity once they take it home. Our reason and logic has long suffered from our relentless tsunami of emotions.
The race into the lead begins, driving the suckers and grudgers close to extinction. However, as there are less and less suckers to exploit, the rancorousness ones slowly begin to advance. Over time, the rancorousness customers rise and rise, with the cheats declining and the suckers never recovering. It seems that a sustainable system is dominated by rancorousness.
A large multinational found that every time it added a “hero shot”-that perfect, smiling face-to a webpage, the number of customers who left the page immediately after arriving shot up. Once the hero shot was removed customers stayed on the page much longer.
Puzzled, the multinational started doing some usability testing. A typical response from a customer was: “When I see a picture like that I just think marketing. I’m at the website to solve a problem. I don’t have time for this stuff.”
As long as the world was full of suckers it was easy for marketing cheats to make an easy killing. But while the web has its suckers, it really is the land of rancorousness. It is the land of comparison shopping and customer reviews. It is the land of rapid search and the “Back” button.
The Web is where customers become the biggest organization of all, because it allows them to organize in a way they never could before. A good product or service has nothing to fear from the Web. The rancorousness customer will trust, but verify. So it is up to you to deliver.
The media lives off our fears. Advertising lives off our dreams. The rancorousness customer is nobody’s fool.