Should we care about consumer opinion?

If our products and services are greatly conceived, fantastically marketed, flawlessly positioned, and all the right resources are in place, why would we care about consumer opinion? We should be able to hold tightly to our vision of excellence and stay true only to the course which is inherently dictated. After all, consumer opinion is wild and unpredictable, and we rely on metrics and science and proven measures to ensure our success!

Candy is one of my new favorite people. She did a preso at Refresh Dallas the other night. I was pretty impressed with the group in general. It was designer-heavy, but that was why I went there... to keep my breadth and stretch a few muscles.

In (I think) the 17th slide of her presentation she stated concisely what I have essentially been saying to my customers for a long time: "Consumer opinion (trust) depends on your business being transparent, coherent, and genuine."

I cannot claim originality, since some great ColdFusion evangelists have taught me this idea for many years - and I am grateful. But the statement was just much more packed together than my usual inspirational tirade about personal voice and consistent honesty, and how your customers will know the truth, etc. But all this bears the scrutiny of the initial question. Should we care? And if so, why?

I posit that consumer opinion is OUR own opinion. Specifically, it is an evolutionary and dimensionalized version of our opinion. Have you ever had an opinion that didn't evolve? Every sensation, testimony, and experience that we have characterizes the weight of our opinions. If we are selling it and someone is buying from us. - or potentially doing so - there is an inherent dynamic between consumer and producer (us). The resulting opinion is always a collective, though (and most likely) we may be unaware of the recipe. In the end, our opinion of our own product and our trust in its value must effect our ingredients. We either catalyze or react. We might call this strategy for instance, or maybe inspiration. In the end, it is simply our part.

The true impact of the consumer's contribution may be as clinical as a force of finance or much more sticky involving layers of social and administrative variables. Each of these pathways does have a beginning and an end point, though. And somewhere the opinion of the consumer and the producer will tally up to complete the overall content of the "pathway". So knowing whose part is which should give us better information to produce and operate with clarity, and reduce overhead and maximize profits from the consumer, right? Some people think so. I can't see it though. I think the analysis gamble is far too complex. I don't want to be a better card counter.

I think we should care about OUR collective opinion. Exercising our strategies from an ethical or values basis, we can find patterns. These vectors (patterns) will look a lot like the pathways that exist in and around our markets. I see this as market astronomy. Like following the stars and their movements to learn about how we fit into the larger universe. We definitely collect a lot of data and create concrete formulas to maintain consistency. We just do so with care for the larger opinion, realizing that ours is only one pathway.

This values-based approach shines light on the idea of "being transparent, coherent, and genuine." It turns concepts like transparency into a necessity for information flow. Coherence becomes the effort of giving and sharing and listening. And being genuine... well, that is the mother load! I'm sure a google search would be blogtastic on the subject. Mostly, I think genuineness is where caring about a consumer opinion comes into play. The rest is just mortar. And being genuine is as much about perception as it is projection.

I guess I will leave it there for now, but I think a much longer analysis of being genuine is in order. Stay tuned.