• by Kathleen Stockham , March 19, 2013

Heads up, marketers: You do not control the CRM relationship; your customers do!

I recently spent my entire weekend with cheerleading moms in Dallas, at the National Championship and, ironically, in our downtime, there was a lot of discussion about stores and brands and their marketing efforts. It was fascinating to listen to. (If you know anything about Cheer Moms, you know we are not short of opinions!)

Without divulging what I do for a living, I paid rapt attention to what they said. In essence, the notion that “CRM” (at least in their minds) is how they manage you, the brand, and not the other way around.

“I assign folders in my inbox to certain companies; those I want to read and hear from, and those I don’t,” said one woman.

“Oh, yeah, I do that, too. One folder is only for email I want to read and everything else is automatically dumped in my ‘when-I-have-time’ folder,” said another, who also added, “I hardly ever read it so I just take the entire folder and move it to the trash about once a month.”

And there is more…

“You know that one [housewares] store that sends the big discount postcard in the mail? Yeah, I never bring that to the store; I just tell the lady behind the counter I forgot mine, and she always has a big stack she uses and, boom, there’s my discount. I never have to worry about remembering coupons.”

And then there is this…

“Those guys at [that department store] who want us to use those QR and phone codes for private discounts? Yeah, I figured out it’s the same discount given in the store for the one-day sales the day before as the ‘preview-sale.’ It’s the EXACT same discount, so I won’t use the phone thingy – I won’t let them have my cell number.”

And social?

“I get paranoid on Facebook about my likes and whatnot, so I don’t ‘Like’ [shoe retailer’s] page, but I creep their wall anyway once in a while to get the discount codes and use them when I need to.”

So there you have it. All the lofty plans and words and “how-to’s” and everything else we do in this industry smugly assuming we “own” customers and the pre-destined path of CRM is the cruel joke everyone is in on but us. 

Are we the real “customer” being managed here? 

Does the customer “own” the relationship?

You bet they do.

One of the biggest light bulbs of enlightenment for me in listening is that customers are far smarter in figuring out the loopholes and “bent rules” around getting what they need than we give them credit for. Any marketer at this point who thinks they are smarter than their customers deserves a smack on the head and a kick to the curb, pronto.

Crafty, resourceful shoppers have far better access to other crafty, resourceful shoppers than ever before. You can blame Pinterest, social media, blogs, message boards, TV news and any other medium you want to but fact of the matter is they have us right where they want us.

The greatest, smartest database in the world can’t get around the bare fact that customers “own” the pipeline of access to them be it email, postal box, mobile phone or computer screen. Our job as marketers is to make it compelling enough for them to stick around but their job (as they see it) is to decide whether or not they will let us in.

Doesn’t give us much to cheer about, does it?