Tag: employees

Marketing, an inside job.

Posted on by philipdodson

Many businesses talk about how important their people are and then do little about it. They are too busy marketing to the outside world.

A business is a myth, it is not a real thing, it is a thing in the ether, a thing registered on paper. What makes it real, makes it human, brings it to life are the people. They are the tangible elements.

Every single thing that a business does is marketing and the delivery of the service comes from people, the staff of the business. Employees make every single business.

Happy, inspired staff, make for happy inspired customers and those customers spread the word and that brings new customers to be inspired.

So marketing to staff the vision and story so they are inspired is more important than telling the outside world. Passion comes from people not about us pages on our websites.

Marketing is an inside job.

Self-checkouts

Posted on by philipdodson

Self-checkouts are great for the retailer, well short-term they are. After a period of time, they claw back the investment on the kit by the savings in wages.

Longer term, they lose the human interaction with their customers.

I might be alone here, but part of the attraction of retailing in person is the human interaction versus the sanitised world of click and buy. It is what keeps me going to one shop versus another, it is part of the simple pleasures of life that are systematically being eradicated from our lives.

Lastly, perhaps we could move on from this failed model of the never ending cycle of saving money to increase profits. The only gainers in that model are the shareholders, not the customer or employee.

I prefer to support the human touch.