Is the booger-eater smarter than your CEO?

Is the booger-eater smarter than your CEO?

After recently visiting a nearby (half-full) amusement park and hearing her parents comment on the seeming-inevitable rise in parking costs year after year, a friend’s pre-teen daughter showed a heck of a lot of wisdom.

“If they made parking cheaper, wouldn’t more people visit so the park can be full?” she asked.

See, this kid who isn’t too many years from thinking a booger is a great snack gets what the CEO’s of amusement parks, for example, don’t get: If you don’t play fair with customers, they’ll eventually quit playing with you.  They forgot about the PEOPLE and thought more about the bottom line – and ended up putting an obstacle in front of their customers before they even walked in the gate!

So much of succeeding in business is about removing obstacles to different actions: obstacles to purchase, obstacles to click on a link, obstacles to setting up a meeting – and unfairness is just one of them.

Take a look at airlines: most pack on so many hidden fees that you distrust them (and are usually angry) before you ever get on the airplane. That’s an obstacle to click when you’re purchasing online. And at the gate do you feel purchasing a ticket from them is a smooth and easy transaction? Another obstacle to purchase. And it’s all because the transaction is more about THEM than YOU.

Other obstacles are intrusive questions when checking out at stores (you don’t need my phone number to sell me a pair of trousers, bucko), refusing to split checks at restaurants (yeah, make it harder for me to actually pay you), or making customers sign up for a long-term commitment just to purchase a simple product (how’s that working out BMG, Columbia and all you other record execs?)

Look at your marketing in the same way – what obstacles are preventing your target from taking the action you want? Poor grammar and misspellings that undermine your credibility? Perhaps a dated website that makes you look behind the times? Anything that causes your potential customer to pause is an obstacle that must be removed.

What other obstacles are companies throwing at their customers that drive you nuts