One of the things that our highly segmented media world has done is to provide a lot of information on things that are, in the scheme of things, pretty meaningless. That thought occurred to me as I was watching the election results the other night and there’s a useful business point that it raises. We’re all aware of the various “tilts” the news networks have. They tend to focus on every little fact that advances their point of view and that denigrates a political figure with whom they don’t agree. I’ve written before about the echo chamber and what it can do to your perspective. This is an extension of that phenomenon. What’s the business point?
Partisans are focused on every detail. Most people aren’t. They build a narrative that’s as simple as possible and once that’s in place it’s very hard to change it. As an example, I saw a Latino interviewed who said Romney lost his community with the “self-deportation” remark he made many months ago in a primary debate. Game over. The various commentators seemed surprised by the fact that certain arguments and billions of dollars in political ads didn’t seem to make a difference in the outcomes of many races. It works that way for your business as well.
We’re partisans for our brands. Hopefully we know our brands and our businesses inside and out and we’re fixated on every little detail. We can talk for hours about why the store is set up the way it is or the amount of work that went into a piece of content. That’s myopic. Most of our customers don’t care. Like the hard-core viewers of cable news, there are some who pay attention to the details but the bulk of folks don’t. To a certain extent these media outlets are seeing the trees of today’s news cycle and missing the forest of the public. We might lag behind our customers in the same way.
No amount of marketing will fix a bad initial experience. Opinions are very hard to change once they’re formed. What’s your opinion?
Consult Keith 