Customer Speak – A Marketing Blog from Bridgz Marketing Group

Your Customers Don’t Care by Bridgz

Dick Damrow was a long-time friend and associate, and one of the better marketers I’ve had the honor to know.  We worked together in the ad agency business back in the mid-1980s when he was a top exec in one of the larger agencies in Minneapolis, before he decided to get into database marketing. We remained close friends over the years and when I started my own marketing agency a decade later, I engaged Dick as a consultant to help define a competitive position in what was then a market driven by advertising and brand development.

He asked what my vision was for our fledgling little agency and I told him I believed the Internet was going to empower the customer in a way never seen before, shifting the market dynamic from push to pull. This would require companies to stop obsessing about their own brands and adapt to a more customer-centric business model, focused not on selling but helping customers buy. It also would create the need for a different agency model designed to help companies adapt to a pull marketplace, driven by data insight rather than creative intuition.  The challenge, I told him, was communicating this in a credible way to potential clients.

Dick nodded and said he’d have to give it some thought. He came back a week later and suggested that what we needed was a tagline.

“A tagline?” I asked, thinking his old ad agency tendencies were resurfacing.

“Yes, something very succinct and right to the point.”

“And you have one in mind, I assume.”

“Your customers don’t care.”

“That’s the tagline?” I asked, incredulously. “Don’t you think that might be a little off-putting to our clients?”

“You said it yourself,” he told me. “It’s not about your clients, it’s about their customers. They are too preoccupied dealing with the rigors of their own daily lives to care about your clients’ brands. Your job is to make them care.”

“Well, you’re right about one thing; it’s succinct and right to point.”

We didn’t go with the tagline, but the idea of engaging with customers where they live, on a more personally relevant basis and making them care, has been a fundamental tenant of our marketing methodology.

Dick Damrow passed away earlier this year and I never got the chance to tell him how much I cared, and that he was spot on as usual.

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