Story 6

Who We Serve

A Customer Story

Spy novelist John Le Carré once observed, “A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.” If the only customer information used in your organization comes from dry PowerPoint presentations and impersonal statistical data, you probably don’t understand your customer any better than you understand your own medical charts.

There’s no substitute for getting out of the office and meeting your customer face-to-face. But since not everyone in the company can do that as often as they should, you, as a leader, should be telling the stories of the people who did—especially the truly enlightening ones.

Here’s an example:

In 1993, Rohini was a new marketing manager for a brand of disposable feminine protection pads in India. She was on a three-day visit to the southern Indian city of Chennai to conduct in-home research. Her goal was to find out what was driving low-income women to buy her expensive brand of disposable pads when they had been using cheap, reusable cloth pads during their menstrual period.

When she arrived at her first interview, the woman of the house smiled and invited Rohini to sit on one of the only two metal folding chairs in the room. Rohini took in her surroundings: It was a two-room dwelling, small kitchen alcove, no TV, no refrigerator, and no air-conditioning. Behind the door, on two nails, hung a man’s shirt, trousers, and a blue-checked linen towel. And on the table under the window, precisely stacked, were a pile of school exercise books, primly covered in the regulation brown paper.

The woman looked older than her years, and tired. Rohini was intensely conscious that she was interrupting her quiet time of the day, when her children were away at school and her husband was at work. She described their conversation this way:

Early on in the discussion, it became clear that she wasn’t using our product herself. She was buying it for her eighth-grade daughter, who had been using cloth. I asked her why she’d started spending money on it if her daughter had already become used to cloth.

“It’s because she has to go to school, you see,” she replied.

“Well, what did your daughter do about school when she was using cloth? ”

“She would go, all right, but she just felt uncomfortable…couldn’t concentrate. With these pads, she doesn’t feel the wetness, so she feels more comfortable. And she doesn’t have to worry about staining.”

“But don’t you think that it’s a bit expensive for you, just to give a comfortable feeling to your daughter once in a while?” I asked.

“Yes, it is expensive, but then she needs to be able to concentrate in school, to get good marks.”

So I asked, “Why is that important? After all, presumably you will want to get her married after school, so why are good marks important?”

“I want her to study further after school. I don’t want her to get married too early.”

“But you yourself got married at the age of sixteen. What’s wrong with that?”

She leaned forward and looked me in the eyes as she explained very soberly: “I don’t want my daughter to be like me. I want my daughter to be financially independent, to be able to feel comfortable in the outside world. Whether she marries or not will be up to her. She has to study, get good marks, and go to college and then get a job. I don’t want her to have two kids by the age of twenty. I live my life through my children; I don’t have many aspirations for my own life now. But my daughter must be different from me. And that’s why these pads make sense to me.”

No doubt Rohini’s team wrote a proper, clinical summary of their conclusions and observations on that research trip. But the most effective vehicle she left for helping others understand the customer was the intimate portrait contained in the story about meeting that one woman in Chennai. That story has been circulating around her company for over two decades now and helps new employees understand their consumer to this day. Meanwhile, the statistical summary probably hasn’t been seen in twenty-five years .

Tips to help you craft your own customer story

Get out of the office and meet your customer face-to-face.

Go on a sales call with the sales team.

Tag along with the research department on a customer visit.

Stop a shopper in the aisle at the grocery store when you see them buying your product.

Whatever you have to do, make it happen.

When you get back, write a story about your experience and what you learned.

Ask other leaders about their personal experiences with consumers and customers. Somebody has a great customer story like Rohini’s. Find it, and tell that story.