All customers are not created equally

All customers aren’t the same. This is true on several levels. Gary Vaynerchuk gets it. Here he talks about internet users specifically but there’s so many other types of customers out there. They all look the same when they walk in the door but they’re not the same other than typically being bipedal and mostly symmetrical along their vertical axis.

We were recently resetting a store and some of the product got put in three different places. When I go to Home Depot looking for paint I will also possibly need paint brushes, hole filler, and putty knives. I would fully expect all those things to be near the paint. They typically are. Later looking at the sheet rock I will now need a putty knife to spread out the seam and tape sealer mud stuff (Sorry to have gotten all technical on you with no warning.)  If I’m looking for a way to get gum off my floors and am in the cleaning section with the floor cleaning supplies there’s a good chance it will occur to me that a floor scraper may well look an awful lot like a putty knife. All three of those things are aimed at different people in spite of being the same part number.

I, as a retailer, need to make sure I have my product wherever it is the customer will be looking for it. That sounds simple, but for 14 years we’ve put all the widgets in the widget section, whether they also went well with whizfiddlers or not. The leap there was a big one for us as a company… in spite of being painfully obvious. If The Powers That Be were asked before we were told “If I want a widget I’ll look in widgets! Why would I look in whizfidlers?!?” We weren’t allowed. Same item, different spots was a “Bad Thing.” (Notice the capital letters there.)

This isn’t what he’s talking about and I know it. He’s talking about those people who will get excited about something and share it with others. I think Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point, referred to those people as ‘mavens.’ It’s one thing to like a guy’s video… it’s another to click the “share me” link on the page or copy and embed it into another blog somewhere to get the message out. The transition from consumer of information to sharer of information is what advertisers, and anybody in sales who doesn’t consider themselves an advertiser should probably look into other work, should be after. The people who make that shift… the people that go from listeners to talkers & story tellers, those are the people advertisers and sales people need to identify and court.

Anybody walking in the door intending to leave money in your business is good to have. The people who are going to tell other people to go throw money at you are great to have. That’s all I’m saying… It’s all Gary Vaynerchuk’s saying… and it’s sort of what Steve Woodruff appears to be talking about as well.

The All customers are not created equally by Rich Griffith, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.