I am completely dumbstruck by this account from Beyond Buzz author Lois Kelly about an occurrence just before spoke to a global company’s marketing staff.
One of the company’s marketing execs told me that some customers would be speaking before me to give the marketing team a sense of what the real customer is all about. Wow, I thought, what a great way to open the conference. Hear the real views of real customers in their own words. Fantastic.
But – unbeknownst to most of the marketing staff — these “customers†were actually actors hired by the advertising agency. As I was sitting in the green room with them, the actors let it slip to me what was really going on.
If this is how the marketing “professionals” of our major corporations act, it doesn’t bode well for the profession.
Call me Pollyanna, but I really have a hard time imagining that, in this day and age, when we hear so much talk about the importance of trust in customer relations and transparency in business practices, people are pulling these kinds of stunts. With their own marketing staff, no less.
Andy writes! 