IF THERE’S A single cliche that drives us up the wall, it’s the one in which small store owners are hailed as the paragon of one-to-one marketing. We’ve heard it from a dozen consultants (none of whom do actual relationship marketing for a living).
Please. It’s one thing to tell that to the undergraduates, but you really ought to spare grown-up audiences.
Unless you’re buying a $5,000 bracelet at Tiffany’s, in which case you get a complimentary glass of champagne, there’s no such thing as true one-to-one marketing on the retail level (at least not in terms of customer care).
Take those corner businesses, which allegedly know what you want the minute you walk in the door.
If he’s in a good mood, the guy at our local coffee bar will remember that we order three containers of Colombian, no sugar, every morning. But he forgets as often as he remembers, and he gets surly if we change the order even slightly, as in “Make that two coffees and one tea.”
Then there’s the local drugstore, run by a man with a suspicious nature. Not only does he ignore what longtime customers want, he tails them around the store to see if they are shoplifting.
And finally there are the big department stores, in which the help is uniformly nasty. But why shouldn’t it be? You’d be nasty too if you had to stand on your feet for 10 hours, taking guff from petulant customers. (How many times a day does the average salesclerk hear this conversation stopper: “Let me speak to a supervisor”?)
We suspect that catalogers are much better at caring for their customers and employees, but it’s hard to know since the scenes are not played out in public. One thing’s for sure: They can’t be any worse.
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