Although the marketing philosophy of business argues that you should take your customer's perspective, this does not mean that maximization of customer satisfaction is the goal of the company. Profit maximization is the goal of the company. A while back there was a rather useless debate in Marketing News (the newsletter of the American Marketing Association) on whether marketing is about making love (to our customers) or about making war (with our competitors). Some professors said it was the one thing; other professors said it was the other thing. Still others said it might be both. Actually, you make both love and war with your customers and with your competitors (and suppliers and allies). We are all joined in a game of trying to get maximum output for minimum input.

It is nice, of course, to talk about loving, win-win relationships with our customers. But win - win is really saying nothing. All exchange relationships are win - win by definition. Even " your money or your life " is an invitation to a win-win relationship. But how much do you win and how much do I win? That question is ignored by talk of love and win-win. But it is the central question of marketing.

It is not the goal of marketing to maximize customer satisfaction by discovering what customers really want. Dilbert, the famed comic-strip anti-management philosopher, offers insight on what customers really want: better products for free.

If your customers are truly and deeply satisfied and tell you they would never go to your competitor, not even if you doubled the price, then what do you do? You conclude they are too satisfied so you double the price.

You actually try to do as follows: Keep the customer sufficiently satisfied so the customer does not go to the competitor. Any additional satisfaction you balance out by increasing price and your profit. If you succeed in making the customer completely dependent on you, then you can forget about customer satisfaction altogether.

It is even possible that customer satisfaction becomes a negative for you. For a near - monopolist like Microsoft, for example, current sales are the main competitor of future sales. If Microsoft were to satisfy its customers it would reduce sales of upgrades. This explains why new versions of Word contain subtle new ideas to frustrate customers (such as footnotes that randomly insist on spreading themselves out over two pages), while popular and even essential features, such as "split screen" and "reveal codes" are taken out. Which manager at Microsoft decided - and why - to take such a critical feature out even as the program overall grew much bigger? I wish antitrust lawyers had asked Microsoft this question. Five years from now Microsoft will put the old feature back in (and take something else useful out) and call it innovation.

Interestingly, Fortune's info-tech columnist Stewart Alsop noted recently (April 28, 2003) that software you have to use, such as Word or Outlook, is designed to " really drive you crazy, " while optional stuff, like Palm synchronizer or Google, works smoothly. He wonders, " If there's some way the people, Microsoft, who make the frustrating software could learn how to design their programs as though they were optional. " The answer, unfortunately, is that the " driving you crazy " features of Microsoft software do not reflect Microsoft's incompetence, but rather its genius.

 

The article is an excerpt from The Marketing You Never Knew, Chapter 2, ¡°Marketing, What It Is¡±.