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Over the holiday period I heard from so many of you from around the globe who seem to have nothing better to do than read my wit and wisdom. And yes, I have it on good authority that I am read internationally from pole to pole, from continent to continent and across the Ridings. I have now become a global phenomenon. I was told that I was now a cult. Or at least I think that was what the man said. The room was very noisy. So to all of you who think I am a cult, thank you.

Now onto more serious matters.

As someone who has spent their entire life at the marketing coal face, I have a great responsibility to see that the investment my business makes in marketing is not wasted and that we get as many bangs for our marketing buck as we can. There are many ways that businesses might waste the money they invest in advertising or promoting themselves to customers and potential customers. They might produce a really naff advert that says all the wrong things about them like…no, I had better not go there, I might want to work for them. So sadly no names, no pack drills.

Or their ads or marketing investment might not get noticed. It might for example be appearing in all the wrong places and not be noticed by its target audience. The sort of thing that might happen if 4x4 car manufacturers were to advertise in the Green Gazette or some other enviro-mentalist rag, albeit an organic rag, of course. Hopefully you get the point and see what I am driving at here, no pun intended.

But over the holiday period I was reminded of the most powerful way to ruin and spoil and undermine a business’s marketing effort.

Do you know who in your organisation or business works in marketing? If not you should.

You all work in marketing and that includes you, yes you. You might not know it but you are as critical to the marketing effort of your business as those who might have the word ‘marketing’ in their job description or title. In my book, in any business you are either serving the customer or helping those who serve the customer do their job better. And if you are not doing either of those jobs, what are exactly are you doing? And if this point is not taken on board, your business too is in imminent danger of wasting whatever it spends on advertising or on promoting itself to its customers.

Let me give you a great and real life example of this. And yes this really did happen to me though again no names will be revealed to protect the guilty. I might want to work for them too. They certainly could do with something like me to help sharpen up their customer experience.

For the past month or so I have been trying to resolve a fairly straightforward query with my credit card. At least it should be straightforward but this is an organisation which does not accept my theory that we all work in marketing and where those dealing with customers are let down by those designing the systems and processes designed to help but which only get in the way of giving great, not just good, customer service.

Having been bounced off four geo-stationary satellites positioned above the earth’s oceans and having had my call to a historic and very pretty English town routed via the arid and sun kissed plains of the Indian sub-continent, I experienced all the horrors of trying to deal with a faceless call centre. To start with the call centre menu did not give me an option to speak to an operator. And no one, from the hugely important customer service representative to the decidedly less important marketing manager, I spoke to on my many calls into this organisation seemed to be aware of this. Does anyone not check the customer experience? Whose responsibility is this?

And responsibility was a big issue with this organisation. You will know from my previous outpourings of wit, wisdom and enlightenment in this space that I am a fervent apostle of picking up the napkin. In this company not only was the napkin not picked up but also roads were crossed and people would go round the block to avoid even seeing it. Every observation I made to improve the experience I was offered, and if you know me you will know that these observations would be many and trenchant, was greeted, if that is the right word, with the response that they were only following procedures. People have been hung for only following procedures.

It was not possible to be given names and phone numbers. It was not possible to be transferred. It was not possible to be given a call back at my convenience but only at their convenience. And yes we do take customer service very seriously and your call is important to us. Why do these businesses think I have nothing more important to do than wait by the phone and wait for their call? It is of course true that I do have nothing better to do but I am not going to admit that.

And when the department which writes the letters, and these are a separate bunch of people from those who speak to you, and who work in a hermetically sealed room with no contact with the outside world, or so I am told, did eventually getting round to writing to me with the additional information I requested, the letter had clearly been written by someone on work experience from the local primary school who had not yet mastered the basics of spelling, grammar or punctuation and who failed to appreciate the convention that everything communicates. Clearly they knew and were embarrassed by this as the letter failed to give any clue as to the writer’s name, position or department and they hid behind the anonymity of the corporate squiggle. A big no-no as far as I am concerned.

Now this is a company that advertises a lot. You will see their name writ large on TV screens, in the press, on posters, in fact if the space can be used for advertising they will be there, that is how big they are. For me though they have found the most effective way to waste all this investment.

So what is the moral of this winter tale? There are a few. We all work in marketing and we all have a responsibility for making sure that everything we do is focussed on giving the customer the best experience we can give. It means we should work together to identify and remove the barriers that get in the way of helping the customer and doing what is right for them. It means we should all regularly test and try our customer experience to see where it goes wrong. And please please sign your letters. If we can all do this and accept these ideas and beliefs, anything our business spends on marketing will not be wasted.

And remember too we all have a responsibility as customers. If we accept bad or poor service, we condemn the next customer to bad service. We legitimise it. We condone it with our apathy. So kick up a fuss. I do.

Finally I hate this time of year. Once you take the cards down and pack away the tree and other Christmas baubles the world looks grey, dismal and empty. It is now the long haul back to the long days and short nights of summer with only the rugby 6 Nations with its perennial and unrequited hope of a Scots triumph, and the sunny green spectacle of the US Masters, to look forward to. And so to cheer you up here is my top tip for a cheap and quick laugh if you are at a loose end. Why don’t you pop into your local branch of Specsavers, go up to the staff and ask for a Big Mac and fries. Sorry, should have gone to Specsavers.

Have a great week. Et este fortanatus