All the Customer's Tyranny
There's been a lot of talk this week about bad buzz and All The King's Men not performing well. It just goes to show how incredibly plugged-in consumers are now to what used to be industry sausage-making. Soon fans will boycott films because a favorite actress or director passed on it 2 years ago.
In "The Tyranny of the Customer?", MediaPost's Wendy Davis takes issue with Chris Anderson's remarks at a recent event. Paraphrasing, she disagrees with his assertion that Google now controls your brand more than you do, and that one customer can now create enough bad-buzz to bring a brand down.
Now, I wasn't there, but I'll bet Mr. Long Tail was engaging in a bit of hyperbole to make a bigger point - that fewer and fewer people are having larger and larger impacts on public opinion due to the equalizing effect of the Internet. It's a good thing.
Even more interesting than Davis' post are the comments that follow, mostly in disagreement. Nicholas Wright from Wireless World Forum writes:
"The tyranny of the customer is really just the overthrow of the tyranny of the marketers, sales is more of a two-way process than ever before. If you will, the marketing has actually fallen into the hands of the customers and placed greater pressure on companies to improve and provide the service they should be providing anyway. Brands must interact or at least observe and respond to their customer reaction if they want to survive: whether this counts as a tyranny or not is in the minds of marketers."
As for All the King's Men, we could take away that studios need to be more careful about chosing and pushing release dates, but I hope instead we think of new ways of addressing bad buzz for whatever reason, by engaging with the customers - not trying to control them.
