I find it annoying that ICICI Pru sends me emails everyday about healthy food and living after I bought a life term policy. This presumption of marketers that they need to be more than just the product/platform/service in a customer’s life is delusional and a legacy...

... from the days when brands had longevity, founders/execs wanted brand longevity and the number of brands you are surrounded by was a cognitively manageable number. With the profusion of channels, marketers feel compelled to engage on ALL channels without pausing to think...

... about the product scope and interactions that matter (ITMs). If I have your policy, make sure I clearly understand the key benefits, am able to renew easily, can reach a person promptly when I need help and am informed when a new product that I can upgrade to or that...

...complements my purchase is launched. You are not my yoga subscription and you are not my dietician.
The other presumption brands have is that somehow their product has revolutionised my life, so much so that I really care about re-organising my life and freeing up time to..

...talk to you. WhJr got my goat for several reasons chief of which was every time my 8 yo daughter gave 3 feedback stars (8 yo!), a call center exec will call me to check what about the class was wrong. I don’t think it dawned on the company that several parents...

...joined during Covid and one prominent persona was working couples who needed to “engage” their children. No parent I know was sitting and monitoring classes. This was the first time a young child was exposed to this UX element of feedback stars. She clicked whatever the...

...fish she liked. Maybe it doesn’t say much about me as an involved parent but you calling me every day to discuss the class/feedback/teacher is just encroaching on my time and not respecting (or at all understanding) my life as a customer. Deliver a good service, spend the...

...time on revising curriculum to suit different learning styles, aspirations. Understand that customers don’t always purchase a product for the need that you are selling through the advertisement. This revelation comes not from mkt surveys of 1000 people, but from talking to 5.

When I finally quit, I gave polite and detailed feedback on what needed to change. Then they called me 3 times to repeat that feedback.

Companies grow clunkily and in an effort to do more, never get around to doing better. In an effort to appear to care, they intrude and repel.

If you talk to 5 different customers, you will be able to tell the difference between not just what you say and what they hear, but also what they say that you never knew.
Maybe you can reduce costs, launch a variant, up your NPS with this knowledge.
But alas, you just spend!