communication is essential to business making and it involves more than the ability to name your product, write a tag line or a press release. It's an intricate, rational and scalable effort and, let's face it, not anyone can do it.

1/10/2008

Tyranny of the consumer

My work is a constant source of questions.
Today I was wondering how much we should be asking our consumers to solve for us. We ask them to rate our products, to decide on packaging, an communication, to evaluate our brand, to create content for us. Today, I heard that consumers can also be asked what product they would like the company to produce. Surely that should be a question the company must know in advance..
Or not?
I mean I understand the concept of crowd sourcing but truly if the consumer knows all and we only do what he tells us, what are being paid for? are we not slaves to a tyrant who's sometimes less informed than us? do we not suck ass? :-)
This deserves more thought.

2 comments:

Corina Bordeianu said...

You cannot ask the consumer everything, even though Romanians know everything. :)
This will diminish your team's creativity because you ask them to reorganize the data from a normal person (which do not have the same content power as your team would have outputted).

Bogdana Butnar said...

Yeah, I agree. But why then does everyone seem to be doing it? I think it may be the cover your behind strategy. It;s hard to fire your own consumers if they screw up in a Focus Group and you're somehow okay because you only asked ...