Businesses Listen Intently (But Not To Words)

“Companies don’t care about what ordinary people like us think.”

Never has a single sentence been so accurate and so wrong at the same time.

This is highly ironic, because in a modern economy, just about any other aspect of a company’s operations -- anything like design, manufacturing, sales, support, distribution, advertising, accounts -- can be readily outsourced to a vast army of private firms who specialise in doing these things. Basically all of the parts of the company that you would normally think of as integral to its operation are available at almost any scale as a service, and for costs that would provide serious competition to doing them in-house.

The reason it’s so ironic because the one part of the company’s sales cycle that absolutely cannot be outsourced is identifying customers who have a need and how to satisfy their needs for money.

Of course you can’t outsource that: it’s the bottleneck, a licence to print money if you can do it well.

For all the good and bad points of modern capitalism, this is one of the things that it consistently does extremely well. Pretty much every successful consumer-facing business in the open market is very, very acutely attuned to its customers anywhere those customers’ behaviour drives revenue. That’s why they’re still in business.

In other words, by far the hardest part of creating or running a business today is to be attuned to its customers’ behaviour when it comes to them giving the business money. If you can do that, everything else is academic, and can readily be outsourced or otherwise the problem made to go away.

This is a very narrow way of measuring customer behaviour, and it does not measure customer beliefs directly. It measures exactly what is needed to drive the behaviour towards spending money at your company; no more, no less.

The entire infrastructure of e-commerce that has been built over the last few decades largely revolves around doing this as effectively as possible. Your movements and interactions on the broader Internet -- and even where the Internet intersects the physical world -- are tracked and stored and analysed endlessly to the highest degree of detail that is remotely feasible for the companies selling you things.

This ecosystem is built and optimised around the exact incentives that drive businesses to care very, very much about how consumers behave. It’s by far the largest, most elaborate and most detailed study of human psychology in history. If a person’s behaviour can be driven towards spending in a certain situation, then that situation has been picked apart as much as humanly possible.

The entire structure and operational methodology of businesses is built around this process. They form around consumer behaviour, which follows from consumer thoughts and emotions, and everything else in business is constructed on this foundation. Consumers’ thoughts are the hearts and souls of corporations, just not in the ways that might seem obvious.

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Originally written: 20 Dec 2019

Written on: 6.25mg? olanzapine

Mental health was excellent