A Face To Answer To

Photo by Mery Khachatryan on Unsplash

When my wife moved with me from the Netherlands to London, she changed her phone number. Since then she has been locked out of her Kindle account, because the verification step is tied to a number she no longer has. An admin oversight sure, but then she was single-handedly managing the logistics of our entire move. A professional yoga teacher of almost two decades, much of her Kindle library is the reference material she relies on for her work: books she's studied closely and filled with highlights and notes over many years. On a yoga teacher's income it isn't a library she can simply repurchase, and the annotations can't be replaced at any price. Amazon gave her four reasons for refusing access: no activity in twelve months, no valid payment method, no recent orders, no linked devices. Every one of them is a direct consequence of the lockout they are declining to fix. She cannot use an account she cannot enter — so of course it shows no activity, no orders, no devices. All customer service have done is describe the symptoms of being locked out and offer them back to her as the justification for keeping her locked out. Despite offering to provide the email address the account was registered under, access to that inbox, past order-confirmation emails, bank or card statements showing Amazon and Kindle charges, the billing address on file, and the titles in her Kindle library — itself a record of purchases tied to her account — "Earth's most customer-centric company" persists in trying to close the ticket. Which got me thinking…

What would happen if we reminded ourselves of Drucker’s words – that “it is the customer who determines what a business is. It is a customer, and he alone, who through being willing to pay for a good or a service, converts economic resources into wealth, things into goods”? The customer is the first author of the business – and, in Druker words from 1954 “what the customer thinks he is buying, what he considers is ‘ value’, is decisive.”

What would happen if, recognising the primacy (and as Mark Ritson reminds us, the power) of the customer, we understood that the first goal of the business is not extraction, but to be of service to the customer? That, as Helen Edwards reminds us, “what consumers need is better products, improved service, easier lives, a cleaner world, and more health and happiness “. What if we remembered Howard Gossage’s declaration that our first obligation is not to the sales curve, but to the customer standing behind it? And that all else – market share, pricing power, revenue, profit, valuations, dividends, and bonuses… is downstream of that.

What would happen if while foundational to the practice of marketing, we saw that “market orientation” is only half a turn – that you can orientate a whole business towards the customer and still owe them nothing? Knowing the customer is not the same as being answerable to one — you can know everything about someone and owe them nothing. Understanding is a research problem, but service and responsibility is an ethical one. Meta understood its youngest consumers in granular detail but when the People of the State of California came for it, the suit was not a failure of knowledge — it was the bill for a company that knew everything about the person and had decided to owe them nothing.

What would happen if we admitted that responsibility of this kind cannot be held in the abstract – that it requires a face? A real, human, physical face. The face of someone specific, met, spoken to, listened to, whose life you can picture being better or worse for what you did. French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas argued that responsibility is not something we arrive at after weighing our interests, but the demand made on us, ahead of any calculation, by the sheer presence of another person. In other words, we do not get to decide to be responsible. And according to Levinas, it is the face of the other that summons it out of us. The face is not data about a person – it is the particular someone that no amount of information about them can replace.

What would happen if we saw the danger in dissolving the particular person —  the face —into a general system? Levinas called it the “totality “– a way of thinking in which “individuals are reduced to being bearers of forces that command them unbeknown to themselves “.

What would happen if we saw that abstraction — market, audience, segment, culture etc. — anaesthetises responsibility? The American farmer, poet, and essayist Wendell Berry (who sadly passed away recently) argued that responsibility runs on what he called “affection”, and affection runs on knowledge of the particular – on tangible contact. For him, you cannot truly know an abstraction, because there is nothing to grasp. Affection, he said, has to be particular or it is not affection at all: “if it is not personal, it has nothing “. Similarly, American psychologist and founder of the research institute Decision Research Paul Slovic pointed to what he called “psychic numbing” – the repeated finding that our capacity to feel responsible does not rise with the number of people at stake but collapses under it. We will move heaven and earth for the single child in trouble. Set the same child inside a statistic standing for thousands, and the feeling gets flattened towards nothing. The individual generates responsibility — the aggregate renders the specific invisible, and leaves no-one to answer to.

What then if we recognised that while necessary, we cannot afford to let abstraction and generalisation make us lose sight of what it is built from. Aggregation is not the enemy – it’s a necessary discipline of any business at scale. The Pampers team at P&G cannot personally meet let alone know the tens of millions of people with babies. But a market is people. A segment is people. A statistic is people, counted. The danger is not the number but when we can no longer see through the aggregation to the people that it stands for. To a face.

What would happen if, reflecting on this, we sat with how easily an act can be stripped of its ethical weight by rooting it through enough distance and technical mediation that nobody along the chain ever experiences themselves as acting on a person? Put enough screen, enough metric, enough abstraction between the decision and the actual human it lands on, and the ethical weight of it evaporates. Through the simple banality of distance.

Perhaps we would come to see that the missing thing in the rhetoric and practice of “customer centricity” and “market orientation” is an ethics. Responsibility in service does not live in how much we know, or with which tools or methods, or how sincerely we feel. Ethics is an unwavering standard of behaviour towards another — and feeling responsible and being responsible are not the same thing. One is a mood — the other something that endures.

Perhaps we would accommodate ourselves to the truth that every hour spent in a meeting is an hour not spent meeting the person who matters. Perhaps one wouldn’t hear the words “the consumer is stupid “as I did at a holding company agency, or read on LinkedIn that so-called seniors “don’t even know how to use Google” as I did this week. Perhaps organisations would mandate time away from the screen. Or incentivise their partners to (in the words of Rob Campbell) “get out of the zoo and into the jungle”.

Perhaps we would start making real, unmediated contact with real life again. Perhaps clients organisations would reflect that over the past several decades their partner agencies have been almost entirely de-skilled in qualitative research, i.e. the art of meeting, talking and listening to consumers (and properly analysing their responses). Perhaps we’d dare to notice the inverse correlation between seniority and direct customer contact. Perhaps would reflect on the irony that the vast majority of those who would claim they are the “voice of the consumer” have never actually heard it first-hand. Perhaps if we did start making actual contact we’d start not just understanding those we serve, but would keep them real enough to be answerable to.

Perhaps we would recognise that to be worth anything, that full orientation (not the half turn “market orientation” makes) towards  the customer has to harden and manifest into a devotion and a discipline. One that is chosen, and chosen again, against the easier direction.

Perhaps we’d appreciate that such an ethic cannot live only in one person’s mind. It has to be built into what the business is – written down, embodied in the organisation’s account of itself, priced in, built into product and protocols, made a standing constraint the numbers are not permitted to overrule. After all, a resolve that isn’t built into the institution is just hoping people will be in the mood.

Perhaps we would admit the inadequacy of so much of the usual inherited brand apparatus. The gorgeous ninety-page coffee table brand book your agency spent nine months building. The brand keys, onions, temples, bowties and the whole geometric bestiary. The anthropomorphisation of brands (“friendly and optimistic”, anyone?) that has all the utility of throwing a drowning person both ends of a rope. The fill-in-the-blanks positioning template that we were taught absolutely has to be filled in this way and spent two days workshopping in an airless meeting room and that the e-commerce, engeering, product, sales, and finance teams will never know exists, let alone use. The vacuous corporate mission/vision/purpose boiler plate (““to empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more” ) that is nothing more than gesture without substance. All of it (and more) describes but never dares to actually prescribe, and never says anything about what it actually owes the person on the other side.

Perhaps we would finally retire the old “a brand is as a promise” aphorism. A promise is a declaration – a speech act – something you say at a moment in time. But a commitment is the underlying state that makes a promise not merely credible but enacted and experienced — the ongoing willingness to bear the cost, re-order priorities, and keep going when it stops being convenient. You don’t utter commitment so much as demonstrate one. Where a promise is verbal and discreet, a commitment is behavioural and continuous. And while a promise is usually made to someone, a commitment is held by someone, to a person, a course of action, or a standard. You can be committed to something you never promised anyone. The reason “empty promise” is a cliché and  “empty commitment” barely parses is that a promise can exist without the backing, whereas the commitment is the backing.

So enough with the philosophising and let’s get practical and say it plainly – a business ethics of responsibility and service involves commitments, and a commitment comes down to just two questions. What will you always do for that person? And what will you never do to them? Whatever the number says. Even when you don’t publicise it. Even when there is no one to see whether you kept your word.

I might be idealistic, but I am not (entirely) naïve. Every Always and every Never closes down what the organisation most loves to keep open – its options. An Always forecloses. A Never forecloses. Each one shuts a door the business might later wish it had left open, and refuses to reopen it when the circumstances or incentives shift. That is not a flaw in the commitment. It is the commitment.

My wife is still waiting for a reply to her (3rd) email.

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Sources

Drucker, Peter F. The Practice of Management. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954.

Edwards, Helen. "Too Many Marketers Ignore Their Primary Task." Campaign, 20 June 2012. https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/helen-edwards-marketers-ignore-primary-task/1136834.

Gossage, Howard Luck, and Jeff Goodby. 2006. The Book of Gossage. 2nd ed. Edited by Bruce Bendinger. Chicago: The Copy Workshop.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985

Ritson, Mark, Frontier Brief: Marketing is a hot mess right now—and Mark Ritson is actively tearing it apart, Think with Google: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4cpd-2vVtA

Slovic, Paul. "'If I Look at the Mass I Will Never Act': Psychic Numbing and Genocide." Judgment and Decision Making 2, no. 2 (2007): 79–95.

Berry, Wendell. "It All Turns on Affection." Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities, Washington, DC, 23 April 2012.