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Don’t raise expectations you cannot meet.
Expectations, Satisfaction, and the Perils of Hype
What dissatisfies a client?
It is not bad service in some absolute sense of “bad.” You send a letter to
New York that takes three days. Is that bad delivery? Well, it is terrible delivery
for an overnight service and hideous delivery for a fax, but it is acceptable
delivery for a letter. It is the level of service you have learned to expect. So you
are satisfied.
A customer’s satisfaction is the gap between what the customer expects and
what she gets. Service below her expectations makes her dissatisfied—and the
greater the gap, the greater her dissatisfaction.
This means that one of a marketer’s most suicidal marketing weapons is
hype. Few marketers can resist using hyperbole to boost sales. But does it work
for the long term?
Ask IBM. In 1983 IBM introduced its PC Jr. with an uncharacteristic flood of
hype. Americans got “Charlie Chaplined” into believing that this new PC would
be the IBM of personal computers.
That raised people’s expectations enough. The added hot air from what was
typically such a modest company inflated expectations even more.
The PC Jr. could never meet those expectations. People who tried the PC Jr.
were dissatisfied, because it fell below the enormous expectations that IBM’s
hype had created.
Because of that debacle, IBM lost a chunk of its customer franchise. If IBM
had tried to follow the PC Jr. with a product that really was revolutionary, few
would have believed it; IBM had lost the credibility needed to make that claim.
It was seven years before IBM earned its way back in, and then only with an
exceptional product: the PS 1.
It could just as easily happen to you.
To manage satisfaction, you must carefully manage your customer’s
expectations.
Your Patrons Are Saints
She has come to you.
