Listen to your customer - navel gazing part II

It's too easy to become self-absorbed as a business owner. And once you start spending time looking at your navel, you stop listening to your customers.

Case in point (once again) is Canadian Tire. Earlier I wrote about their perfectly dreadful website and now they have canceled production and delivery of their catalogue, which forces people to go to their perfectly dreadful website.

The Canadian Tire catalogue is an icon to Canadian baby boomers. It had an extended shelf life in bathrooms all over the country. And now, no doubt thanks to a hip and happenin' marketing team, this icon is no more. Was there an actual review of customer behaviour?

I can accept there is a cost savings on making this decision. Printing is costly. Distribution perhaps even more so. But hiding this motivation under the environmental wonderment of saving trees is almost pathetic.

For decades, Canadian Tire customers have used the catalogue to stream-line their purchase behaviours. They would browse the catalogue at their leisure (making them more susceptible to the marketing messages) and discover items to buy they didn't even know they wanted. And there is nothing leisurely or even intuitive about the Canadian Tire website. So kiss those add-on sales good-bye.

Why did Canadian Tire stop listening? First they ended the great TV commercials with the lovingly annoying Canadian Tire couple, now they are eliminating the catalogue. Both of which were strong representations of the brand. There was a hew and cry, even in Marketing Magazine, about the end of the TV campaign. That campaign had garnered enough recognition that it had reached the often unattainable heights of being mocked by comedians. And the death of the catalogue has been mourned in Canadian Workshop magazine (which no doubt is the biggest demographic of Canadian Tire shoppers).

So now that the rant is finished, how does this pertain to your business?

Listening to your customers and knowing when something is working for them is paramount to success. Just because you have become bored with your marketing tactics doesn't mean your audience isn't reacting to them. And there is no point in trying to become something other than what your customers want you to be. If Canadian Tire is trying to appeal to a younger audience with these changes, well they have lost their minds. Visit a Canadian Tire and see how many young people are there, other than their ill-trained, ill-informed part-time staff. So not only are young people not their audience but they are alienating their solid baby boomer audience. And good heavens, baby boomers have most of the disposable income in this country!

So the lesson here:

1. Talk to your customers. Find out what they like and don't like. And use that information as a guide.

2. Don't let your personal feelings about being bored with your campaign be the deciding factor in whether to continue.

3. Understand that mocking by comedians is the highest compliment to the strategy there is. Comedians won't mock something unless it has had enough audience hits they are guaranteed 90% of their audience will know what they are talking about. I spoke with some folks from AIG Assurance the other day. We talked about the mocking of their insurance for seniors - they actually track how many times they are mocked and they love it! Kudos to them.

4. Don't cancel a marketing program that is working. You may think that the hew and cry is valuable because it creates chatter, but negative chatter can destroy your business.

And for Canadian Tire, for pete's sake, you could have saved money by making the catalogue by-request-only. Which would have given you a pretty solid database to really pinpoint behaviours and characteristics of your audience. Maybe think next time.