It can be easy to get frustrated with your customers, but it’s almost always a bad move. As Seth Godin said years ago:
“if you hate your customers, you’re going to hate your business.“
You don’t have to like all of them all of the time, and we even fire some from time to time. However, on the whole, we love our clients and I hope that you love yours.
In David Ogilvy’s classic book “Confessions of an Advertising Man“, he reminds us of this with a simple statement:
“The consumer isn’t a moron. She is your wife.”
To him, it’s a way to remind us that people aren’t “consumers”, they’re humans. They have names, they have lives, they’re probably fairly smart, and they have a lot going on. As many things do, it brings me back to the idea of sonder, which is the idea of “that moment when you realize that everyone around you has an internal life as rich and as conflicted as yours“.
Customers can be frustrating at times, but they’re humans. They have lives, and good days, and bad days, and everything in between. Heck, the consumer might even just be your wife.
