Consumers hit the back button
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Our chairman, Alex Batchelor reminds marketers that what’s done cannot be undone. Make sure your customers don’t have to resort to the back button when dealing with your brand.
The most used button in online search is the back button. I have this on good authority from Mich Mathews, senior VP, central marketing group, Microsoft, speaking at our breakfast event last Monday morning at the Royal Opera House.
It struck me as an interesting insight – because what it is really implying is failure. We hit the back button a lot because we have not found what we were looking for – and this tends to imply that things are less intuitive than we are led to believe.
Even using my iPhone (now very uncool I am told by my Blackberry-toting teenagers – although they had to explain the word they used to mean uncool) – I am amazed by how often I hit the button to return to the home menu.
I also remember the arguments we had at Orange with both Microsoft and HTC about the importance of a home icon button that would pull you out of the labyrinth back to the beginning again. And the number one piece of customer feedback at TomTom was about the need to have a back button on each and every menu. All incontrovertible evidence of failure.
Now there is absolutely nothing wrong with failure. Indeed inventors, from Edison to Dyson, write love letters to the productivity of failure. However, while failure is OK for product development, it doesn’t work for communications or the customer experience in today’s public world of mass social networks and online communications. Because there is no back button.
It reminds me of Mr Towler, my physics teacher, teaching us about entropy. He placed separate piles of salt and pepper in a bag, and then proceeded to shake the bag. He explained that separating this mixture back into separate piles of salt and pepper via the random process of shaking it was both statistically improbable and practically impossible, because the mixture now had higher entropy.
In today’s world, a brand’s mistake in customer experience or communications is like the salt and pepper mixed together. What’s done cannot be undone. You cannot un-know things and you can’t always restore a relationship to the way it was.
All marketers who are going forward always need to remember this. I am not sure that Mr Towler would have realised how prescient he was – but this week’s suggestion is that all marketers should remember “there is no back button on customer experience.”
Posted: June 28th, 2010 | Author: Glen Dower | Filed under: Growth Drivers | Tags: alex batchelor, growth, mich mathews, microsoft, the marketing society | Leave a Comment »
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