No one more profoundly affected acting in the 20th century than Constantin Stanislavsky, the creator of method acting. Among his tradition-shattering theories of acting was his belief that an actor’s main responsibility was to be believed—even over being recognized or understood.
To achieve belief in the minds of the audience, Stanislavsky held that actors must draw on their emotional memories. To express fear on stage, for instance, the actor would remember a personal terrifying experience, and then reincarnate that fear on stage. Stanislavsky knew that this would generate empathetic connections between the audience and the characters on stage to tighten the relationship between actor and playgoer. Having actors inject their personalities into a play was a major break from theater tradition. Before method acting, actors were supposed to leave their emotions behind and become the character they played as envisioned by the playwright.
Another title for this chapter could be method marketing because it’s about building empathetic connections with customers.
Stanislavsky taught actors how to emotionally connect with audiences because he knew that people go to plays to be moved, not taught. Playgoers might value a play for its power to enlighten, but unless its intellectual content is emotionally arousing, the play will not succeed. Similarly, customers must have strong emotional connections with brands to stay loyal to them.
Building customer loyalty is one of the biggest issues in business today. Everyone knows by now that it costs more to get customers than to keep them, and that long-term customers are generally more profitable than short-term customers. Nevertheless, weak customer loyalty has become a national corporate plague. CRM was supposed to help cure this problem through computer-generated personalized offerings and messages enabled by sophisticated data mining software. However, as Harvard’s Susan Fournier and her colleagues reported in a 1999 Harvard Business Review article, the proliferation of mass-produced automated communications alienates many customers. [1] Beyond some threshold, automated personalization trivializes personal relationships. If customers don’t feel special, they don’t feel loyal.
Richard Forsythe, chief CRM guru at CRM-forum.com, reported in one of his weekly epistles that a Proctor & Gamble product manager sang the blues at a September 2002 CRM conference in Paris. He summarized the product manager’s woeful tale as follows:
- Internet-branding doesn’t work for us anymore because generic goods are gaining market share.
- Advertising doesn’t work for us anymore because there are no mass channels of communication left.
- Product innovation doesn’t work anymore because competitors can copy and roll-out successful innovations within three months of launch.
- We’ve tried CRM, but we don’t seem to be able to get it to work for FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods).
- Could somebody please help? We don’t know what to do.
To get a better insight into the marketing manager’s plaint, let’s revisit Stanislavsky’s idea that achieving believability with the audience is more important than achieving recognition or understanding of what transpires in an actor’s role. When an actor fails to act believably, he fails to engage his audience no matter the brilliance of the play. Similarly, a brand will not engage customers no matter its merits if it lacks believability—which makes it no more desirable than a cheaper generic product (as in complaint 1).
Saying that advertising is not working any more because there are no mass channels of communications left (complaint 2) disregards advertising’s increasing irrelevance to customers because—let’s face it—marketers are less in touch with customers, their needs, and what motivates them than ever before. If that weren’t true, then marketing would be working.
The complaint that product innovation doesn’t work anymore because competitors can copy and roll out successful innovations within three months of launch (complaint 3) is a product-centric perspective in a era when a customer-centric perspective works better in solving marketing problems.
The fact that CRM has not served P&G as well as it hoped in fast-moving consumer goods (complaint 4) is not unique. CRM hasn’t worked for hundreds of companies across a wide range of categories. CRM initiatives have consistently overpromised and underdelivered because they have ignored the "soft side" or subjective dimensions of customer behavior.
"Could somebody please help? We don’t know what to do." This is a cry that thousands of companies are issuing today.