“…it is blanketed with anonymity and foul air. “ – Alistair Cooke
Although Cooke was referring to Los Angeles, the sentiment seems relevant in another context. Dennis Kennedy is one of a number of voices chiming in on the futile practice of trying to shield employees from public view by removing their professional, biographical, and contact information from websites. These are employees in firms that practice a relationship-based industry, mind you. Mushroom management, sheesh.
Why are firms doing this? They think it will make it harder for headhunters to poach people. Riiiiight. Now, let’s take this out of the recruiting dimension, and focus on the customer.
It’s almost as if these organizations feel that their employees, and therefore the connections they can make with customers, are completely interchangable. The implication is that the customer is interacting with the “brand,” and not a person. That’s simply not the case.
“After all, the customer can get to know a brand, but the brand can never get to know the customer, so it’s no surprise that customers are much more loyal to individual employees than to the logos on caps or business cards,” writes Frederick Reichheld.
Take away the person from either side, and what’s left is a synthetic relationship, a connection with a fabricated ideal.
Note: Thoughts on this are currently being colored by the first couple of chapters of The Loyalty Effect, which I finally got around to starting during this week’s adventure. The book makes the argument that companies that elicit above-average loyalty in:
- customers,
- employers, and
- investors
end up being noticably more profitable than the average.
(hat tip: legal blog watch, carolyn elefant)