People are the last P in the 5 P's of marketing: Product, Price, Place, Promotion, and People.
Your argument that it's people and personality that sell, not brands, reminds me of an argument with the chair of marketing at Gloucestershire uni in 2002, complaining about service in UK supermarkets. He couldn't understand why the cashiers didn't help customers bag up goods, but just scanned them, and watched the customer bag everything up.
"What's the added value to draw back repeated customers?", he asked. Apparently, in Canada, you get supermarkets competing to hire staff who are helpful to customers, and keen to get jobs. Customers there, apparently, shop according to friendly staff at their supermarkets! Here, there's less enthusiasm for such jobs, so the supermarket is lucky if it can get people agreeing to do the minimum job requirement of checkout operation. (I now try to use self-service to avoid feeling treated like dirt and being depressed.)
My counterargument was that you don't have all 5 P's in England due to high living costs and tax. You drop promotion and people off the end, and supermarkets etc. are selected on the basis of just the first 3 P's, "Product, Price, Place". The English question is:
"Does it have the right food, toothpaste and bin bags, at the right price, in the right place?"
You don't ask: "Are the service people friendly and helpful, and which supermarket has the longest promotional ads on the telly, starring the most fashionable celebrities telling you to shop there (because they're being paid to do so)?"
Personality and people-oriented services do exist in high end delivery, but then you're paying through the nose for it.
Presumably, Walmart in the USA and Canadian equivalents can afford to hire their friendly "greeters" and customer (rather than efficiency!)-orientated checkout staff, because they're paying less corporation tax than the UK system of government?! To be a real heretic: if we can deter costly wars cheaply, we can live a more civilized lifestyle, because taxes will be lower, and people can climb further up Maslow's hierarchy of human needs, to include decent behavior and not merely minimal survival requirements. Instead of spending trillions killing people and creating millions of war refugees, if we deter invasions and wars, we'll end up with a better economy and a happier lifestyle like the Canadians!
(I got grade A for that marketing module, whereas the English PhD mathematician chair of programming only gave me a B's, despite twenty years expertise in programming. So maybe Canadians are also more tolerant of innovation! Basically, Parkinson's law of bureaucracy starts off in government spending on essentials like mass killing for virtue signalling purposes aka Tony Blair's approach 2002, which literally "costs a bomb", which then contaminates personal and corporate taxation for the public, which then results in the 5 P's of marketing being reduced to 3 P's or less.)
Good points, Nige - well done on that module. Sometimes I do self-service in the supermarket as smaller queues but I love a chat in the Co-op (about the empty shelves etc) and notice when they bag my goods for me. They usually do even though these roles aren't as well paid / valued in the UK vs US.
I went to a five-star hotel this week (had a spa voucher) and the customer service wasn't great. Ordered salmon - sandwich arrived sans salmon with no explanation or alternative offered. Very young staff who weren't v self aware - moaning about being overworked in public spaces etc. They seem to have lost some of the older staff who knew what they were doing. It makes me wonder what will become of these old school hotels offering silver service etc.
People are the last P in the 5 P's of marketing: Product, Price, Place, Promotion, and People.
Your argument that it's people and personality that sell, not brands, reminds me of an argument with the chair of marketing at Gloucestershire uni in 2002, complaining about service in UK supermarkets. He couldn't understand why the cashiers didn't help customers bag up goods, but just scanned them, and watched the customer bag everything up.
"What's the added value to draw back repeated customers?", he asked. Apparently, in Canada, you get supermarkets competing to hire staff who are helpful to customers, and keen to get jobs. Customers there, apparently, shop according to friendly staff at their supermarkets! Here, there's less enthusiasm for such jobs, so the supermarket is lucky if it can get people agreeing to do the minimum job requirement of checkout operation. (I now try to use self-service to avoid feeling treated like dirt and being depressed.)
My counterargument was that you don't have all 5 P's in England due to high living costs and tax. You drop promotion and people off the end, and supermarkets etc. are selected on the basis of just the first 3 P's, "Product, Price, Place". The English question is:
"Does it have the right food, toothpaste and bin bags, at the right price, in the right place?"
You don't ask: "Are the service people friendly and helpful, and which supermarket has the longest promotional ads on the telly, starring the most fashionable celebrities telling you to shop there (because they're being paid to do so)?"
Personality and people-oriented services do exist in high end delivery, but then you're paying through the nose for it.
Presumably, Walmart in the USA and Canadian equivalents can afford to hire their friendly "greeters" and customer (rather than efficiency!)-orientated checkout staff, because they're paying less corporation tax than the UK system of government?! To be a real heretic: if we can deter costly wars cheaply, we can live a more civilized lifestyle, because taxes will be lower, and people can climb further up Maslow's hierarchy of human needs, to include decent behavior and not merely minimal survival requirements. Instead of spending trillions killing people and creating millions of war refugees, if we deter invasions and wars, we'll end up with a better economy and a happier lifestyle like the Canadians!
(I got grade A for that marketing module, whereas the English PhD mathematician chair of programming only gave me a B's, despite twenty years expertise in programming. So maybe Canadians are also more tolerant of innovation! Basically, Parkinson's law of bureaucracy starts off in government spending on essentials like mass killing for virtue signalling purposes aka Tony Blair's approach 2002, which literally "costs a bomb", which then contaminates personal and corporate taxation for the public, which then results in the 5 P's of marketing being reduced to 3 P's or less.)
Good points, Nige - well done on that module. Sometimes I do self-service in the supermarket as smaller queues but I love a chat in the Co-op (about the empty shelves etc) and notice when they bag my goods for me. They usually do even though these roles aren't as well paid / valued in the UK vs US.
I went to a five-star hotel this week (had a spa voucher) and the customer service wasn't great. Ordered salmon - sandwich arrived sans salmon with no explanation or alternative offered. Very young staff who weren't v self aware - moaning about being overworked in public spaces etc. They seem to have lost some of the older staff who knew what they were doing. It makes me wonder what will become of these old school hotels offering silver service etc.
Family member Phil in Canada says they're all drinking Canadianos now :) Love that there's a Canadian Network for Imagination and Creativity - have signed up for their Idea Jams: https://canadiannetworkforimaginationandcreativity.com/registerhere