{"id":270,"date":"2010-03-13T16:09:45","date_gmt":"2010-03-13T03:09:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brainaudit.com\/members\/?p=270"},"modified":"2010-03-13T16:10:14","modified_gmt":"2010-03-13T03:10:14","slug":"you-are-not-your-customer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brainaudit.com\/members\/you-are-not-your-customer\/","title":{"rendered":"You Are Not Your Customer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/brainaudit.com\/members\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/03\/cow.gif\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-269\" title=\"cow\" src=\"https:\/\/brainaudit.com\/members\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/03\/cow.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"136\" height=\"100\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s a trick question. Who owns your website? Who owns your business? Surely it&#8217;s you, right?<\/p>\n<p>You couldn&#8217;t be more wrong if you tried! So who on earth owns your business?<br \/>\n<strong><br \/>\nWell, who owns Coke?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s go back to 1985. New Coke was the unofficial name of the sweeter drink introduced in 1985 by The Coca-Cola Company to replace its flagship soda, Coca-Cola or Coke. Properly speaking, it had no separate name of its own, but was simply the new version of Coke, until 1992 when it was renamed Coke II.<\/p>\n<p>Public reaction to the change was devastating, and the new cola quickly entered the pantheon of major marketing flops. However, the subsequent reintroduction of Coke&#8217;s original formula led to a significant gain in sales, which conspiracy theorists believe was the original purpose all along.<br \/>\n(Source: Wikipedia.org)<\/p>\n<p><strong>So who owned Coke all long?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Well, it was the customers. And em&#8230;your customer owns your website. And your business. You can at best, be a caretaker. and create products and services that the customer wants. Of course, this has major repercussions.<\/p>\n<p>You may, for instance, like the colour of your website.Your customers may hate it.<\/p>\n<p>You may personally detest long copy.<br \/>\nYour customer may want to read the complete details.<\/p>\n<p>You may personally want whatever you want. Your customer will tell you that you should be listening and giving the customer what they want.<\/p>\n<p><strong>So are you going to become a spineless jellyfish?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>No, why did you get that idea in your head. You still have a lot of work to do. You still have to put together the products and services based on what you know.<\/p>\n<p>But the biggest mistake most business owners make, is they fall in love with their products and services. And ignore what the customer is saying to them.<\/p>\n<p><strong>But often customers say nothing<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>They just don&#8217;t give you referrals. They just leave. So before they do, you&#8217;ve got to keep probing. You&#8217;ve got to get their consumption levels up a whole lot more. And that&#8217;s what going to bring back a customer who adores what you do. That customer will turn into a friend, helping you along the way, and forgiving you for your silly ways.<\/p>\n<p>Customers can afford to forgive you, y&#8217;know. After all, they&#8217;re the real bosses!<\/p>\n<p><strong>Personal Experience<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>We were in love with our brand at millionbucks. We&#8217;d spent money and time, registering it as a company. We&#8217;d spent a lot of effort and moolah getting the logo right. And customers thought the name wasn&#8217;t um&#8230;too great. Of course, they said nothing. And we listened to nothing.<\/p>\n<p>But the day we changed our name to Psychotactics, they came forward with their feedback. They said: &#8220;Even though we liked your work, and we like you personally, we couldn&#8217;t bring ourselves to give you referrals, because the name &#8216;millionbucks&#8217; sounded so trashy.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Hmmm&#8230;You live and learn. Since then, all our websites, our whole business has been fashioned around customer feedback and participation. You&#8217;d be wise to follow the same system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s a trick question. Who owns your website? Who owns your business? Surely it&#8217;s you, right? You couldn&#8217;t be more wrong if you tried! So who on earth owns your business? Well, who owns Coke? Let&#8217;s go back to 1985. New Coke was the unofficial name of the sweeter drink introduced in 1985 by The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-objections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brainaudit.com\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brainaudit.com\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brainaudit.com\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainaudit.com\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainaudit.com\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/brainaudit.com\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":273,"href":"https:\/\/brainaudit.com\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270\/revisions\/273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brainaudit.com\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainaudit.com\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brainaudit.com\/members\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}