I bought my very first interview suit at Marks and Spencer, back in 1986, when I was eighteen. It was a grey pin-stripe – very conservative – and a long way from anything you’re likely to see me in these days! I can’t remember when I last shopped there, but I’m obviously still on their customer database, because I recently received the latest of their regular audio updates –which also means that somewhere along the line, they’ve logged the fact that I have a visual impairment. All good marketing and customer service practice.
There’s only one small issue: these communications come on cassette. Now, I may have missed something, but I thought the company had put in a lot of work over the last few years, to modernise its brand. I thought they were trying to get away from the image of staid ladies whose sense of style began and ended with ‘sensible’ knickers. Recent ad campaigns seem to be trying to target women across a wide age range who care about fashion and for whom maturity means more style, not less. They want me, as a potential customer, to believe that like me, Marks has moved with the times – and yet they communicate with me in an outmoded format, which most people I know couldn’t even play. Do you still own a cassette player? I do – but then, as a media junky, I’ve got almost every option you can think of for playing the stuff. That said, I never listen to these tapes. If they came as mp3s, I probably would, but the cassettes just get recycled.
I don’t know how many customers the tapes go out to and how many of those still have the means to play them. What I do know is that Marks’ target audience is also the sector of the market where mp3 player ownership is growing. I can’t help feeling that either sweeping assumptions have been made about the audience, or (worse) they’ve gone on doing what they’ve done for years and haven’t included this in their modernising strategies. Either way, it sends me the wrong messages:
1 – M&S isn’t really moving with the times, and/or
2 – they don’t know the sector of their market to which I belong. They don’t talk to me in my language – or even ask me what that language is. They talk at me in a way they think I want, or should want, so I don’t feel inclined to listen to what they have to say.
Marks’ customers with visual impairments will be a small percentage of their total customer base, of course. So you might think this is a very small issue; but there are wider implications. As we all know in business, if we do one thing which is inconsistent with our core message, at best it doesn’t reinforce what we really want to say and at worst, it undermines it.
In case you’re wondering, no, I’m not just going to sit here complaining. I intend to make contact with the relevant people within the organisation to chat through their options with them. I’ll let you know how I get on.