The Organ Grinder’s Monkey

In the comments section of yesterday’s post on making love, not war, with your customers, reader Dina writes:

I think this is a complete misinterpretation of the old cliche. I’m pretty sure that whoever out there is calling business “war” is referring to the competition and not the customer.

In my reply, I said:

A decade or so ago, I would have agreed with you. These days, though….well, apparently you haven’t seen some of the marketing training literature I have. A lot of it does act as if the customer (or prospect) is, if not the enemy, then something akin to prey.

Based on this exchange, I thought I’d expand on this a little today to illustrate what I mean. (Yes, I do have lots of work to do - I’m using this as a brain warm-up)

Although there was, and undoubtedly still is, a blood-tinged atmosphere of war between competitors in the world of business, these days that war is spilling over from the competition front and on to the customer front. But it didn’t used to be that way.

The main reason for this is that back when we (the customers) were all behaving like good sheeple and tuning in to watch tv or listen to the radio like we were told to, there was no need for warlike tactics. We were a captive audience; if we wanted to be entertained or informed, there was nowhere for us to go. We had to watch their commercials and listen to their spin, or go without.

Things have changed.

These days, it’s every man, woman and child quite literally for themselves. You can build personalized, eternal music playlists, rent all your movies, watch entertaining video shows and read up on the news all day long and never see or hear one single ad or commercial, if you so choose. Oh, sure, a few businesses are still trying, putting up banner ads and inserting text-link hovers like commercial landmines in a field of information. But a few simple ad-blocking plugins usually suffices to render all that expensive advertising completely invisible. At the same time, the field of competition has gone from just those who can afford the cover charge of big business to anyone who can set up a point-and-click website. And these changes are creating an unsustainable starvation ecosystem for those on the business end of things.

The end result is that these days, the customer isn’t a sheep to be led, they’re prey to be hunted. As such, tactics have changed.

And the language of the copywriting, advertising and marketing information I’ve seen reflects this change. I tend to avoid the worst of it, but it’s not unusual to see copy like, “how to manipulate customers” and “shooting fish in a barrel.” They talk about using holidays to “break down a customer’s barriers to sales,” and about hitting customers with up-sell promotions when they’re “vulnerable” to buying more. There’s even a software product called Marketing War Room, for crying out loud.

Also, it’s no secret that corporations have big, expensive lobbies to make sure legislation stays on their side. But what most people know (but don’t really think about) is how much of that is spent battling offenses by the very customers these companies “serve.” Whether they’re protecting themselves from being legislated out of using tainted or sub-quality meat, false advertising or deceptive business practices (has anyone ever signed up for a cell phone service and actually gotten the price on the poster, or been able to cancel a subscription service without being sent on a months-long runaround?), businesses are making it clear that while they are indeed still fighting a war with competitors, their opposites aren’t the only enemies on the playing field. Anyone who can negatively impact the bottom line is on their shit list. And that includes their own customers.

And then there’s the ubiquitous phrase, “targeting prospective buyers/customers/the market.” I don’t know about you, but I have never “targeted” someone I loved for any reason. I may focus on them, pay attention to them, look at them, listen to them, think about them and try to figure out ways to make them happy. But I don’t target them. That’s what you do to prey, or other stuff you intend to shoot.

This change is also the origin of web tricks like using onLoad and setTimeout calls that prevent a user from leaving your page by hitting the back button (hitting the back button just reloads the page they’re on). I know I’ve fallen afoul of this annoying practice, and no doubt so have you. It’s also the reason for the innumerable popups, popovers, popunders, floating pop-windows and many other pops designed to make your life hell if you don’t pay attention to what I, the site owner, want you to pay attention to. No deluded site owner is saying to himself, “I bet my customers just loooove popups. Let’s add a few!” No, the conversation is more like, “How can I force them to see this ad?” and, “How can I hold them hostage long enough to squeeze an email address out of them?” And sites that sell these devises or tricks don’t promote the positive reaction of customers. They tout their “unblockable” code and “unavoidable” visibility.

And if you think the “attacks” on customers are solely relegated to web hacks, legislation and annoying advertising, you’re sadly mistaken. They don’t just want control of your wallet, they want control of your mind. Marketing and advertising firms pour millions (it’s probably billions, by now) into psychological and neurobiological research (called neuromarketing) in a quest to track down the marketer’s Holy Grail - the Buy Button. This so-far theoretical “buy button” is a response in the brain so strong and so deeply embedded that we won’t be physically able to resist saying “yes” (most neuromarketing research in this arena is now focusing on the science of addiction, a potent and promising field). The hope is that if the scientists can find it, all advertisers will have to do is poke the button and we’ll buy whatever they put in front of us. It’s a serious enough subject that in 2003, a watchdog group called Commercial Alert actually sent a letter to Emory University pleading with it to halt neuromarketing research, calling it unethical and claiming that it promotes human misery and suffering.

So far, though, researchers haven’t been able to find a specific buy button, although they have found a “don’t buy” button, at least for impulse purchases. This is useful knowledge as well, since it tells advertisers what to avoid. But they are uncovering more and more about how our brain works and the results they have uncovered are continually being tailored for and used by advertisers and marketers, not to gain insight into the human mind so they can better serve customers or create better products, but so they can develop better and better ways of manipulating our responses and thoughts, with or without our awareness or permission.

And I don’t know about you, but that sounds a lot more like psyops (military psychological operations) than love to me.

Tags: Advertising and Marketing, Business, Copywriting, Customers, Ethics and Business //