Upheavals

Be careful what you signpost.

If you’re part of a company with a large customer base, it’s easy to convince yourself that you understand your customers so well that you can actually apply labels to them on signage. You can, in effect, identify them on your terms, and still firmly believe that you are absolutely doing the right thing. You may even believe you’re being helpful.

My Vista Group colleague Jack Yan’s experience at the “Asian Banking” section of a local bank is a wonderful example of customer herding and one that, as he rightly points out, is both factually incorrect and numerically under-representative.

In fact, the “Asian banking” section wasn’t for all Asians at all, because there were only Mandarin-speaking staff. And it wasn’t actually for banking as such, but rather for specific services. As Jack points out, you still did your regular banking with the regular tellers.

When you publicly separate one audience from another, you signpost to people that you think of them as different from the mainstream crowd and that you are going to treat them differently. Unless you do that with unusual sensitivity and tact, that can be a very dangerous signal.

POSTED: Tuesday, 18 November 2008