Note to CMO: Monologues versus Dialogs

Dear CMO:

Just a quick post this weekend -- I'll have something more substantial up on Monday, hopefully, because it's the weekend and frankly, the "lost" photo above will be pointing at my photo until I put something else up -- so I'll be brief.

We drove past a phone pole with a sign stapled to it that said, "Found: two black labs." A block later, another phone pole and another sign, this one naturally saying, "Lost: two black dogs." That, in and of itself, is pretty funny. But it gets better. These two signs interchange on every other phone pole for the next four blocks. I feel bad for both of them.

Why is this worth a post? In this political and business climate, the loss of dialog seems to be a mega-trend of singular importance. Candidates, parties, networks, companies, non-profits, the scientific community, entertainment, and most other institutions that define our culture seem to have decided that talking is more important than listening. When the other person speaks, they go off-line and 're-load' pending their ability to interject their next conclusion. And we're wasting time and money as a result.

Worse, most blogs -- or at least many blogs -- are no better. We read what we like and usually don't read what we don't, thus perpetuating this insulated 'preaching to the choir' cycle. Individual blogs, where actual dialog occaisionally happens, are better than most corporate ones, where layers of bureaucracy and hubris stall any real dialog. That's to be expected to a degree. Blogs and other technological patches have their uses and we may find that we're only beginning to understand how to best use them in a corporate setting. More on that another day.

The answer that occurs to me is that the only way to create a dialog is to ask questions with the intention of receiving answers; nothing compares to face to face interaction with your customers. Please don't mistake this for surveys or focus groups or mall intercepts, all of which are fine for what they're good for but lousy for understanding what people want. Being face to face means no subterfuge, no one-way mirrors or M&M's behind the glass, no moderator who understands the wrong 20% of what you're trying to discover, and no list of checked boxes that describe the pre-conceptions you're trying to prove to your boss.

Face to face means discussion, which is different than two people talking serially at each other like two ideological adversaries meeting in a diplomatic stand-off. Social interaction in situ. Asking questions, getting answers, asking follow-up questions, and getting follow up answers. It means absorbing all the verbal and non-verbal cues we've evolved over the tens of thousands of years to pick up from other people so that we understand when they give you an answer but mean something quite different. Face to face means you get the nuance, see the shrug or the loss of interest, understand the curled lip, and can jump on the point that made one person lean forward and show the sense of excitement that is lacking in "customer insight" today.

Think of it. Two people. Talking not "at" each other, but actually "with" each other. It's... what's that called again? Dialog.


Regards.