I’ve said many times that the relationship between vendor and customer is almost unidentifiable from that of a personal friendship, or even relationship (if you’re an Apple customer). That is why one of the biggest mistakes I personally see companies make time after time is building up a false image of themselves as caring and sharing, and their actions then going totally against this philosophy.

Twitter did it recently.

Telling your customers that you love them, and then proving that you lied, is worse than not telling them anything in the first place. And, in this context, “telling your customers” can be something like using cosy language (”We be IBM. Who you be? :-)”) or it can be a blog post where the CEO is dreaming of you.

My main point: Don’t pretend to be hip, cool, with it, or new media, if you are just doing it for appearances. You will be caught out. And it will be the death of any PR strategy you have or will have.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 9:56 am and is filed under Marketing Practice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.