10 Reasons Why the Customer is Often Wrong

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The customer is always right? Hardly. Customers are the people who pay us, so we’re often tempted to just do as they say. “Smile and please them” is usually the quickest way to getting the paycheck, right? But the reality is that customers often don’t know what’s best for them. Here are 10 reasons why.

1. Customers don’t know what they want. Consumers in focus groups will often say they want their current favorite products, but cheaper, faster and better. They don’t know what’s possible because they haven’t seen it yet. You can’t expect them to lay out your company’s vision when they don’t have one themselves.

2. Customers get consumed by passion and ignore reality. How many times have you encountered a customer so excited by a crazy idea that they lose focus of what is best for them? Passion is a great motivator, and the best business people are visionaries, but they also need a grounding in reality to make those great ideas happen. If they don’t have realistic ideas on how to realize the brilliant ideas spinning in their heads, they’re wasting their time and yours.

3. Customers measure success in ways you might not. You met the deadline, came in on budget, and hit all the necessary points set out by the customer on day 1. So why is the customer still unhappy? This is why it’s important to take a constant pulse of the client’s true feelings along the way. Look for hidden goals that the customer isn’t sharing and be direct in asking if the project is going as she had originally envisioned.

4. The customer’s happiness is not your priority. Yours is. How can you make others happy when you yourself are not? If a difficult customer is making you miserable, you are unlikely to serve that customer with a good attitude and ultimately please him. Worse yet, that misery will influence how you serve your favorite customers.

5. Sometimes customers are jerks. As Gordon Bethune wrote in his book “From Worst to First” about his experience leading Continental Airlines: “When it’s a choice between supporting your employees, who work with you every day and make your product what it is, or some irate jerk who demands a free ticket to Paris because you ran out of peanuts, whose side are you going to be on?” Of course, sometimes you are the employee AND the boss, and you have to give yourself the right to feel empowered to say, “I am in the right here, and the customer is a jerk.”

6. Rewarding bad customers is bad karma. When people treat others poorly, we like to think that they get what’s coming to them. But when we reward them for being unfair, aren’t we reinforcing their behavior and teaching them to keep treating you and others like garbage? By sticking to the mantra “The Customer is Always Right” you’re giving them a free pass to be jerks with no repercussions.

7. The squeaky wheel doesn’t deserve all the grease. It’s widely known that customers are more likely to make an effort to give you their opinion when they’re unhappy about something rather than when they are pleased. This creates an unrealistic picture of customer dissatisfaction. You could be doing virtually everything right, but if all you hear are the complaints of the rare outliers, you’ll be alarmed and may set out to fix what isn’t broken. Don’t always assume that a few negative voices represent the majority. Make sure you also seek the input of happy customers, letting them know you value their opinions and their business.

8. The customer wants to think you’re a commodity. Don’t become one.
If you believe your product is best not because it is cheapest, but because you offer unique quality and insightful solutions, you should not be made to feel that the customer can get served just as well anywhere else. Don’t let negotiations boil down to just who is cheapest or quickest. You are unique. Make yourself the Apple of your market. You’re not cheapest. You’re the best.

9. Turn the saying around: The customer is wrong and your challenge is to show her the light. If the customer is presenting you with an idea you think is wrong, feel empowered to convince her otherwise. If you’re good at what you do, and have the faith and conviction to back up your reasoning, there’s a good chance that you can help the customer achieve her goals but in a way she didn’t originally envision. Of course, sometimes this effort may be futile, and you may have to resort to the final point…

10. Bad customers need to be fired. Just as it’s counterproductive to keep bad employees, a bad customer can be keeping you from achieving your goals. Getting rid of such a customer can be hard on your business in the short term, but if it lets you refocus your resources on making your good customers even happier and going after new ones, you could be better off down the road.

Agree or disagree? Tell us why.

10 Great Works Nearly Nixed by Knuckleheads

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How many times have you toiled away on a project, stood back when it was finished and basked in the pride of a job well done, and then watched in horror as others trashed it?  You knew it was great… why didn’t these fools see it?

Here are 10 inspiring tales of creative works that were vilified by so-called experts but went on to change the world, despite — or maybe because of — their ignoring the norms and expectations of those around them.

1. The Apple 1984 Commercial. When originally shown to Apple’s board, the groundbreaking “Big Brother” spot showing a woman hurling a hammer at a giant screen representing the IBM PC and its clones, was almost killed before it aired.  But Steve Jobs defied his board and got it shown during the Superbowl, and the spot was later declared by Advertising Age, TV Guide and others as the greatest commercial of all time.

2. The Sony Walkman.  Conceived by Akio Morita of Sony so he could listen to opera recordings while on long flights, The Walkman was trashed by Sony executives as a loser since it could only play recordings and not actually record.  But Morita stuck to his vision and the Walkman went on to change how people listened, empowering them to take their favorite music, audio books and other content wherever they went.

3. It’s a Wonderful Life.  First it was a story by Philip Van Doren Stern, who could not get it published after writing it in 1939.  He ended up sending copies to friends as Christmas gifts in 1943.  A copy made its way to Hollywood, where it was adapted into a number of screenplays that went nowhere.  RKO, the studio “stuck” with the project, duped “washed-up” director Frank Capra into buying the script.  Capra made the film, which received lukewarm critical reaction and lost money at the box office.  But despite all odds, the film outlived all the naysayers, and is loved by hundreds of millions, more than 60 years after it was deemed a failure.

4.  Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater.  “If I don’t have your confidence – to hell with the whole thing.”  Such was Frank Lloyd Wright’s answer when his client, department store magnate Edward J. Kaufmann questioned his vision for the home built over a waterfall in a rural area southwest of Pittsburgh, PA.  Ultimately, Wright was able to earn Kaufmann’s complete confidence in the building project, which gained national attention and the inevitable backlash of the architectural intelligentsia, some of whom labeled it as folly and not structurally sound.  Today the Fallingwater home is acknowledged as one of the most important archictectural achievements in American history.

5. Harry Potter.  Author J.K. Rowling’s original manuscript Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was rejected by a dozen publishers.  One editor told the aspiring author to get a day job since she would never make money in children’s books. A £8000 grant from the Scottish Arts Council held her over until Scholastic won an auction to publish the book in the US for $105,000.

6. Star Wars.  United Artists, which had financed George Lucas’ first major movie, American Graffiti, had a deal in which it would also fund production of Star Wars, but it backed out, believing no one would want to see it.  Lucas shopped it around to all the major studios, and almost every one passed. He finally got a deal with 20th Century Fox, but one that earned him a minuscule fee, since he had the foresight to instead negotiate merchandising rights, which would end up making him much more money.

7. Mozart.  “Too many notes, Mozart,” was a famous criticism leveled by Emperor Joseph II, complaining about The Marriage of Figaro.  Some prominent music “experts” of the day dismissed the work of one of history’s undisputed musical geniuses as “too strongly spiced,” “impenetrable labyrinths,” “bizarre flights of the soul,” “overloaded and overstuffed.”

8. Vincent Van Gogh.  The art world of Van Gogh’s time wasn’t ready for his new Expressionism, and his works were criticized as bleak, dark and lacking  liveliness of the more popular Impressionist artists.  Van Gogh enjoyed little to no recognition during his life, and sold just one painting.  He committed suicide, and in the years that followed, his prolific life work of 900+ paintings finally received the accolades they deserved.

9. Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species.  Not all of Darwin’s critics opposed him on religious grounds.  His ground-breaking theories on evolution riled many of his peers, who challenged his notions as foolish.  Darwinism took decades to truly catch on to the point that it is widely taught around the world as the most plausible explanation of the evolution of life forms.

10.  The Declaration of Independence.   Yes, even the most important document in the history of the United States was criticized at the time of its writing.  A committee of founding fathers tossed around the original phrasing of Thomas Jefferson, some of whom were harshly critical of his choice of words.  Passages were revised or rewritten by the group, though Jefferson’s original words ended up largely intact, and the Declaration is now widely praised for its eloquence.

We know we’re leaving out a lot of other tales of inspiration nearly squashed.  Please share your favorites!

10 Best Logo Redesigns

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Logos are tricky things.  An organization spends years or decades building an identity around an image, then out of a need for modernization or to rebuild after a PR disaster, it decides “out with the old, in with the new.”  Thing is, some organizations do it better than others.  Here are our picks for the 10 best logo redesigns in recent memory.

1. Wal-Mart.   Sharp, unfriendly capital letters are replaced with a much softer font in lower-case letters.  Plus, the bold, pointed star was ditched for a more flower-like emblem.  Still not our favorite place to shop, but the logo went a long way toward conveying a more comforting, friendly place to shop.

2. Apple.   The original black and white logo drawn by one of Apple’s founders, Ron Wayne, was too old-fashioned and too intricate for accurate reproduction in small sizes.  The simplified Apple icon was a welcome change — a friendly, everyday object that enticed non-computer users into seeing computers as a fun, welcome addition to their homes.  The modern revision drops the rainbow palette for Steve Jobs’ modern preference for simple elegance in design, a monochrome symbol that looked much more elegant on his cleanly designed devices.

3. Pepsi.   Pepsi’s logo evolution through the years represents a study in simplification.  The ornate original wording full of curly-cues gave way to a simple font in an elaborate bottle cap, with future iterations gradually cleaning up this theme.  The most modern version often drops the Pepsi name entirely, as the red, white and blue circle have become synonymous with the #2 cola.  We like the abandoning of symmetry, the off-center white bulge creating more visual interest than the boring,  perfectly centered wave ever did.

4. Microsoft.   Microsoft’s old logo practically screams 1970s, with funky “futuristic” lettering.  The Os are lined up one top of one another, but why, if they’re not taking advantage of the symmetry?  The newer logo, while never particularly exciting to look at, was a significant step forward.  The integration of the Windows symbol, representing the product that orchestrated the company’s stranglehold on the computer industry, was a savvy touch.

5. Starbucks.   Starbucks’ original emblem featured a topless mermaid, but the company decided to put a more family friendly spin on the design and had the mermaid’s hair covering her naughty bits in an early update.  But the pose of the mermaid holding its legs (flippers?) in the air was still suggestive, and the new logo in distinctive green cropped in to obscure the provocative pose.

6. Google.   Poor Google.  Maybe it’s appropriate that the site with little (no?) graphic design have one of the worst logos in modern times.  The new font was a marked improvement, and as much as we still dislike it, there does seem to be some symbolism going on here, with the multiple colors perhaps representing the variety of content on the Web and the Google word organizes and tries to make sense of it.  Yes, we’re stretching here.  But still, you have to admit the revision is quite better.

7. BP.   British Petroleum has not enjoyed the best PR in recent years, but its new logo at least attempts to present a green, earth-friendly image for the company that had to deal with one of the worst oil spills in memory.  The green and yellow of the old logo is reworked into a flower symbol and the harsh capital BP is replaced with softer, friendlier lower case letters to make you feel soft and fuzzy toward the oil giant.

8. Firefox.   Mozilla retired its almost disturbing bird on fire in favor of a cuddly fox hugging the world, making us want to join in its loving embrace of the World Wide Web and dump Internet Explorer in droves.

 

9. Amazon.   Yes, we get it, Amazon is a river.  But what does that have to do with an online merchant that wants to sell you virtually anything you can think of?  The new logo adopts a friendlier, lower-case typeface and integrates the expression you make when you see an Amazon package on your porch… a big smile.

10. Adobe.   Another example of a tech company starting out with a misguided, futuristic typeface that is supposed to make you think cutting edge and forward-looking.

The problem is, such fonts look cool for about a year or two and then remind you of a bad sci-fi movie from the 70s.  The new logo goes minimalist and elegant, always a good approach when your core customers are designers.

Don’t agree with our choices?  What do you think are the best redesigned logos?