Why Should Your Customer Care About Your Business?
I’ve spent a lot of time listening to businesses talk about themselves.
One thing comes up again and again. They want to tell you how good they are.
How experienced they are. How knowledgeable their people are. How much they care. How they’re different from everyone else.
I understand why.
When you spend every working day inside a business, those things matter enormously. You’ve built something you’re proud of. You know the work involved. You know the people behind it. You know why you’re good at what you do.
The problem is, the person watching often doesn’t care.
At least, not yet.
And I think that’s something businesses find surprisingly difficult to accept.
We naturally see our business from the inside
Spend enough time inside any organisation and you start looking at the outside world through its eyes.
You know the terminology. You understand the processes. You know why a particular piece of equipment matters or why something your team does is difficult.
Your customer doesn’t have any of that knowledge.
More importantly, they haven’t necessarily got any reason to want it.
They’re approaching your business from an entirely different direction.
They have a problem.
They need something.
They’re worried about something.
They want something to change.
This is one of the reasons I believe the camera comes later. Before deciding what a business wants to show people, we need to understand what those people need from the communication in the first place.
And then we come along and tell them we’ve been trading for 27 years.
There’s nothing wrong with being proud of 27 years in business. It might provide useful reassurance.
But that’s different from assuming somebody cares about it simply because we do.
The temptation to tell everyone how brilliant you are
I see this particularly when businesses start thinking about film.
There’s often a desire to fit everything in.
The history. The facilities. The technology. The awards. The services. The team. The experience. The values.
And somewhere amongst all of that, we also need to make sure everyone knows we’re brilliant.
I understand the instinct.
If you’re paying for a film about your business, why wouldn’t you want to tell people how good your business is?
Because saying you’re good isn’t necessarily what makes somebody believe you’re good.
Anyone can say they’re experienced.
Anyone can say they care about their customers.
Anyone can describe themselves as experts.
After a while, everyone starts sounding rather similar.
Perhaps your business isn’t the hero
This is where I think businesses sometimes get their story the wrong way round.
They make themselves the most important character.
But from the customer’s point of view, they’re not.
The customer is.
Your business has a role in their story.
Perhaps you solve something that’s been frustrating them for months. Perhaps you make their job easier. Perhaps you remove some uncertainty. Perhaps you help them make a better decision.
Whatever it is, that’s where your relevance begins.
It’s also where making invisible value visible becomes important. Often the strongest evidence of what makes a business valuable isn’t the claim it makes about itself. It’s found in the people, knowledge and work underneath.
Your experience matters because of what it enables you to do for them.
Your technology matters because of what it makes possible for them.
Your people matter because of how they help them.
Your 27 years matter because of the knowledge you’ve gained during those years and how that knowledge benefits them today.
Suddenly, we’re talking about many of the same things.
We’re simply looking at them from the other side.
This doesn’t mean making everything about the customer
I’m slightly wary of turning this into another marketing rule.
There are times when the story of a business genuinely matters. Its history might be fascinating. Its people might be extraordinary. Its processes might reveal something an audience needs to understand.
Sometimes those things are precisely what make a business worth choosing.
The difference is why we’re telling people about them.
Are we including something because it matters to the audience?
Or because it matters to us?
That’s a small distinction, but I think it changes a great deal.
It’s also closely connected to the question of whether a good business can tell the wrong story about itself. What feels important from inside an organisation isn’t always what an outsider needs to hear.
So, why should they care?
Perhaps that’s a useful question to ask before deciding what you want to say about your business.
Not:
What do we want everyone to know about us?
But:
Why should any of this matter to them?
You might still end up talking about your experience, your people, your facilities or your history.
But you’ll be talking about them for a reason.
And perhaps that’s the difference between telling people how good you are and giving them a reason to care.