John Moore picks up on the provocative and entertaining Guru Red Manifesto: "The customer is not always right" Discuss...

John's piece, combined with the references he cites from Jennifer Rice and Heath Row, is an interesting muse on the nature of the relationship between customers and producers.

This reminds me of another widespread myth of customer relationships, which is the idea that innovation and production is demand-driven. Why is it so hard to buy single or even double-blade razors in supermarkets? Not because consumers demanded 3 or 4 blades on their razors, I guess, but because the suppliers need to find new ways of maintaining revenues from their customer base, regardess of the waste of resources this creates. Working in IT, it is clear that much innovation is actually producer-led and that producers then look for problems their tools can solve, often shoe-horning "features" into spurious, non-measurable "benefits" their products can bring. This reminds me of danah boyd's recent comments about online social networking tools as hammers in search of a nail:

"Why are we asking: what can social networking tools solve? Why aren't we asking: what problem do we have that social networks give us insight to? I remember when i first got involved in technology creation, there was always a technology-first, problem-second approach. A technology was created and then everyone was rushing around trying to put it to use. I find it very entertaining that social networks (which weren't invented, but modeled) are being put to the same process."

In his posting, John also mentions that he blurs the line between friendship and business relationships, which I do too, and he is right to identify that connected businesses and consultants using weblogs will do this more and more. To my mind, this simply reflects a more traditional culture of business which is being rediscovered in the West, but is still very much a feature of trade many areas of the world.

This is fine for consulting, but in the highly industrialised FMCG and other low-margin high volume businesses, the personal approach is hard to recreate. That is why customer centricity consultants like our respected, knowledgable partners at Round face such a challenge in trying to help large corporates create some truly responsive processes and interfaces with their customers.

Is the customer always right? No, and we tell them as much. If they want partnership, they will respect our honesty and work toegether to find the berst solution. If they want a subservient "supplier" to abuse then they go elsewhere.