Chapter 6 Consumer Relations

Chapter 6
Consumer Relations

It seems that the essence of consumer relations ebbs and flows with the years but the sentiment is ubiquitous among those who see themselves as consumers, “the customer is the most important.” Those businesses who truly know that the customer is what matters most will likely find success and those who fail to appreciate it will likely not have any business to worry about. Marketing to the customer became the cure all in the mid 1980s where non-traditional entities such as hospitals and churches began to put serious effort into marketing to those whom they perceived as their publics.

At this same time a debate began to develop about whether marketing and public relations were actually the same thing. Despite the lay confusion of the two’s similarities, marketing is ultimately product specific or service specific where public relations is a more holistic approach encompassing every public not just the customer or potential customer.

Marketing reforms began to change the nature of the function of marketing in the 1960’s and has brought us to a point in which the approach today is a rule : “People want to be served, not sold.” This is the driving concept behind most every successful strategy in consumer relations.

Example

I see this shift with Consumer Relations and serving verses selling in my first person experience with the Spohn Hospital system. In the early 80’s, I spent two weeks in Spohn Shoreline. The general attitude of most all the nurses and staff was negative and rude at best, abrasive and belligerent at it’s worst. The quality of food was awful. No one seemed to take the complaints of patients and their family with any concern or correction. You had the distinct feeling that you were bothering them just being there.

Some 3 years ago, I contracted MRSA and spent another two weeks in Spohn Hospital. The difference in treatment was night and day. I almost found them to be too nice and facilitating. Every single person that I came in contact with treated me with respect, introduced themselves to me and explained what they were going to do for me along with all the options for comfort that were available to me. This change caught my interest so I asked the CEO about what I had noticed and he admitted that in the late 1980’s they realized they had a problem with consumer relations. They began by changing the culture of the employees and how they dealt with patients as well as how they marketed themselves to their publics who have a choice as to which hospital they go to for care. They refocused on “servicing” instead of “selling.”