We had lunch in our local café last
weekend. The waitress had a brilliant, excellent English accent.
Her education had clearly been very thorough in that respect.
However her vocabulary was extremely limited. A table nearby asked
for the bill - she didn't understand. Then they tried asking for
the cheque. She didn't understand that either. Then they got up and
paid at the counter.
She was otherwise good at her job, and
I'm sure she will pick up the necessary language. But the
confusion, indeed customer frustration, was undoubtedly added to by
the fact that her English sounded so convincing when she did not
know the actual terms necessary for her job. Had her accent been
more pronounced then the customers would have spelt out what they
wanted more clearly. Here is a lesson for us all. When you work
with a new client it is often tempting to sound like you understand
more than you do about their business. This can be a mistake as you
end up not asking crucial questions and therefore don't learn what
you need to know to really help them.
One thing to watch out for is
pretending that you understand a particular language of a client
when you don't really. Marketers famously have a fondness for the
three or four letter acronyms. The SKU is the most common example
in the world of FMCG. (I had to look it up to remind myself what
each letter stands for, even though of course I know what it
means). Whilst some acronyms like SKU are the lingua franca of
marketing - others are peculiar to the sector or the organisation.
A particular favourite was some years ago when I was discussing a
new pet food launch with a team of people. They kept referring to
it as Oh Enn Eee. It took me a long while to realise it was the
launch of Purina One that was being discussed. It would have been
better if I had asked the question the first time I heard it of
course.
My personal career as a waitress was a
short lived one. And yet it too had lessons for my subsequent
working life. Here is one of them. When I was a waitress at
Georgina's in the covered market in Oxford I used to delight in
handing generous portions to the customers. Many of my friends, who
were impoverished students, used to come in and I would make sure
that they didn't leave hungry. But one customer changed my mind
about this. She tackled me on the portion size by saying - "this is
too much, I can't eat all this, and I don't want to waste
it." She was right. What she wanted was the right portion,
value for money but no wastage. In my last blog I called for more
complete audience research so that we can understand the full
audience delivery of TV shows however they are being consumed. This
is also not just about delivery of value for money but about
understanding the impact of TV on sales of advertised products, and
the ability to buy just enough TV to avoid diminishing returns and
not to incur wastage.
Next time - my experiences as a shoe
salesperson and how they helped my ability to sell multiple linear
regression models.
First published here on Sue Unerman's blog.