You cannot separate marketing and advertising from employee engagement.

 “I think spending your life trying to dupe innocent people out of hard-won earnings to buy useless, low quality, misrepresented items and services is an excellent use of your energy”

Jerry Seinfeld at Clio Awards

Maybe Seinfeld was joking - maybe he is exposing one of the biggest weaknesses of the outdated economic thinking of the industrial age: The idea that marketing and advertising can change the customers’ perception of a product (or service as a product) through communication decoupled from the actual product.

This might be possible before the customer starts to engage with the product but will change nothing about the product itself. The better the advert is created, the larger distance it will create between the customers’ expectation to the actual performance of the product.

Most mature organisations that follow the logic of the industrial age is focused on large scale operations to lower the costs of the product or service they deliver to the customers – the focus is not on the customer but on the operation itself. This made sense in the early days of the industrial revolution where the manufacturer had more power over the consumer – unfortunately it is still the mindset of most large corporations today. They compete with mature products that look more or less the same as their competitors as their original competitive advantage has been eroded many years ago. As a result they focus even more intensely on optimising their internal operation to deliver the same non-competitive product cheaper.

This means the only competitive element left is price or the sales/service experience itself.

However these organisations treat their sales and service organisations as a cost and not an asset.  Headcount cuts and outsourcing of service organisations to low cost jurisdictions does not demonstrate a belief in these organisations ability to make a difference for the customer.

They do not believe in creating customer engagement thought employee engagement – they believe in cheaper, automated one size fits all service … or lack of. The adverts promise of an often emotionally strong experience is replaced with an automated rules based response from a starved and stressed organisation.

Especially when things go wrong: “Sorry but according to the rules this is not possible”. We have all tried that one.

You do not create satisfied customers by giving them less than what they expect. It gets even worse when mistakes or errors happen and the customer is faced by an automated rules based system. You risk creating antagonistic anti sponsors that apart from mot buying will cause others not to buy either.

A dissatisfied customer represent an opportunity to create an engaged customer. This will only happen though contact with an engaged service organisation that is empowered to solve the customer’s problems above and beyond expectations, an organisation that truly cares about their customers and shows it. 

Employee engagement matters!