When a product fails miserably, why is the customer blamed?

• October 13, 2011

By Francis Moran

When a product fails miserably in the marketplace, why is the customer blamed for not wanting to buy it?

Hang on, you say; that doesn’t happen, does it? Well, it did, and in spades, just last week.

Three well-established brands competed openly for the custom of a large pool of potential buyers. Their marketing campaigns used every media format available — television, radio, billboards and other outdoor, print, social media, telemarketing, direct mail, media relations, events and much, much more. Key spokespersons and local brand representatives travelled constantly throughout the marketplace bringing brand messaging directly to potential buyers. There has never been, perhaps, a more intensive, expensive and well-coordinated an effort to woo customers than was exhibited by these three brands.

And yet, not one of these brands was able to command more than a parsimonious 18 percent total market share. The majority of the customers who were targeted declined to buy from any of them at all. And many of those who did buy did so only with the greatest of reluctance. In fact, it was the least successful campaign ever in the history of this particular industry.

Now, you’d think that any rational analysis of this situation would lay the blame entirely at the door of the brands who failed to build and market a product that appealed to their target customers.

You’d be wrong.

It was astonishing how much of the criticism in the wake of this extraordinary marketing failure was targeted at the customer, with editorial analysts, radio talkshow hosts and my own Twitter stream filled with comments that suggested customers were somehow to blame for not buying what was on offer.

I am talking, of course, about last week’s Ontario general election, where voter turnout dipped below the 50 percent mark for the first time in history and Premier Dalton McGuinty was returned to office, albeit with a minority, having persuaded barely 18 percent of eligible voters to buy his product.

I am a committed democrat who has voted in every election — federal, provincial and municipal — available to me since I first gained the right to do so more than 30 years ago. I do believe citizens have a duty to involve themselves in the democratic process and to exercise a franchise that has been extraordinarily hard won over the span of history and that is not freely available to most of our fellow inhabitants on this planet. As such, I understand the sentiment that most people expressed the following morning: That Ontario voters were to blame for what was characterised in my Twitter stream as a “shameful” and “abysmal” turnout.

As a marketer, though, I cannot lay the blame for such a diminished voter turnout on the voters any more than I would blame a customer for failing to buy a product that was insipid and uninspiring to begin with and that was marketed largely through a mix of patently unsupported claims about its own merits and vicious and largely irrelevant attacks on the merits of the competitors’ products.

Peter Hanschke, our associate who specializes in product management and the development of minimum viable products, would have a field day dismantling the product that any of the three major parties in Ontario put before the electorate and the processes they used to do so. In building their platforms, they violated practically every tenet of good product development.

Then they took their woefully inadequate products and attempted to sell them to a sceptical and weary marketplace by masking over product deficiencies, substituting the personality of the brand pitch men and women for the product itself, and excoriating the competitors for their similarly lousy products.

The outcome was inevitable. Ontario’s election campaign was not a failure of democracy. It was a failure of the three political parties to grasp even the most basic fundamentals of building and bringing a product to market.

Image: Weighty Matters