The era of ‘Scorn’

In the old days brands only heard customers when they chose to. They had to decide to listen, and even when they did, to really hear consumers, they had to listen hard.

They heard them when they held expensive, small scale and very tame focus groups. They heard them when they allowed the call centre personnel to eventually escalate something that they and the customers had known about for weeks, or months, or years.

They filtered, selected, and avoided.

Brands suffered from selective deafness, like an old grandmother sitting in the corner, deaf to everything but the bits she wanted to hear – smart with it, deaf to the bad, but noisy.

Inbound, it was all optional.

Brands input mechanisms were mainly a dumb terminal where feedback was filtered at every stage on the way to the top, and with “everything is fine”, the most default finding.

Yet their output was non-optional. They broadcast and blared out ‘interruption’, but consumers were still loyal because it was hard to find any alternatives.

That was the era of 'Control'.

Well it felt like control anyway, and it probably was, of sorts. Consumers were isolated, and media channels were intermediated and finite. But absolute control never really existed.

This was a period that started in the 1950’s and continued to around the year 2000. Brands were isolated and ‘deaf’, whilst consumers had pent up anger, which continued to build and build as brands did not listen or act.

Jump forward not one, but two steps from here, and we will find that in a new world where brands will have neat, simple, usable tools that flow feedback between themselves and their customers, like stock price data in a live marketplace.

It is a happy and contented world where listening will be a minute-by-minute task, not a daily check, not a monthly clippings report, or quarterly customer service review. But like it is already at some of the major news organisations, where live analytics on what's hot and what's not drive the news agenda and business behaviour.

Like it is already at some of the smart online retailers where merchandising decisions are truly dynamic and flow in realtime.

Like it is already at the few agencies where the finger really is on the digital pulse.

Solutions, ideas, and innovations will be the norm, and things like Dell Ideastorm will look like the simple early prototype it probably is.

APIs, affiliate programs, widgets, and other variations will be givens, seeding thousands of customers around the core services, and distributing them beyond the original source.

Importantly, loyalty will return because time poor consumers will be happier with the mature service-led brands that truly walk a customer-centred talk.

This will be the era of ‘Dialogue’.

But this is the future, a time where we will have the tools and process to mange feedback between brands and their consumers. A place where negativity is channeled, and consumer anger will fall as brands are listening and acting.

But right now we are somewhere between the two.

Not yet in the utopia of Dialogue, nor still in the comfortable era of Control. Instead we are in a turbulent transient time of a different era. But thankfully a temporary era.

This is a painful, confusing period of fear and loathing, away from the utopian aim but and era where we are caught with the basic and dated age of Control ways of working, processes, tools, people and expectations, where the feedback we receive is entirely different, entirely uncontrollable, unmanaged and unmanageable by our current systems.

An era where today's brands are badly equipped for the world today. Welcome to era of ‘Scorn’.

This is a time where angry consumers vent wherever they find an outlet. Customers like you and me who are disloyal and resent having to be so for the time and hassle it costs them.

A time where consumers pour into public and private online spaces to ask one another and quickly establish consensus before a brand even realises, and before brands have seen or collected the lies and half-truths. An era where well respected brands are all exposed to the ruthlessness of the public’s immediate feedback.

Worse still, cowardly consumers prevail in such circumstances. It's easier to scorn at the back of the room, and leave a nasty review than to feedback directly face-to face.

Right now we're at a unique point in this transition, at the very pivot of change, where consumer conversations have flooded online but the brands don't have the infrastructure and time to tap into and address them – online monitoring; umm, hmmm, ahem, yeahhh.

Very few major brands have yet invested in proper buzz monitoring solutions so they simply don't even have an ear to the networked chatter, or a regular, known presence in areas of online congregation such as consumer forums.

And until they do, they won't think about how to respond, who should respond, and what to do with that new incoming knowledge.

This is the era of ‘Scorn’. An era where consumers publish an aggregated voice, but where brands are slow to listen. And although consumer anger will build, it will peak, and eventually start to fall as brands realize that they have to start listening and acting.

As the listening devices, the community engagements, the processes and skills will change our expectations the hope is that we will enter a more harmonious time where the flow of dialogue between brands and consumers will be frictionless, immediate, transparent, open, and available.

And consumers will act more respectfully, and more maturely, because brands will be really listening to them, and responding to them, publicly, transparently, and rapidly.

How long will this take? I have no idea. When you look at mature disciplines or principles in digital such as usability, accessibility or even SEO, it’s normal to find very patchy awareness, let alone regular and consistent use of these core services amongst leading brands.

We must temper our optimism with our practical experience and guess that this will be years. Maybe years and years for the stragglers.

In the interim, we shouldn’t expect too much level-headedness, maturity and decency from the online consumers, but do expect big-talking anonymous cowards, raging frustrated unheard ex-customers, playground social dynamics with polarised opinions and cosy little cliques and gangs.

The era of Scorn is fatiguing, depressing, polluting, childish, unreasonable, bitter, cowardly, and in the main, absolutely deserved.