One of the most important functions of marketing is cultural, to prevent the organisation from slipping into a production orientation, to keep it focussed on the customer and the market.

Recently I was told off in the Bordeaux Apple Store, but rather that take it I told the employee off. You see I had taken a space on a large desk that had lots of spare space, to sit and write on the new version of How Brands Grow. So I’m sitting there with my new MacBook Pro and new iPhone (clearly I’m a good customer) and an Apple Store employee interrupts me and tries to say that this table is only for one-on-one demonstrations. But the table is largely empty I said, if I’m in the way I’ll move. No you aren’t in the way he said, but the table is just for demonstrations. Now this struck me as absurd and I told him so. He said it was store policy. No it isn’t I said. I asked him to reflect how this incident would look to him if he were observing as a third party, or if he were watching it on a customer service training video!

I knew there was no silly policy like this. I’d even previously be summoned into the store to work by an employee who saw me sitting on the ledge outside the store using their wifi) “Come into work anytime he said”. Another employee had told my wife how children were always welcome to play in the Apple Store because they were future customers – to which my wife noted “our daughter is already a paying customer”.

Anyway the Apple Store employee went away, presumably to talk to their manager, came back and said I could continue to work. Then later he interrupted me again, “what now” I thought. And then he not only apologized but thanked me, explaining how easy it is to get into a bad habit, where you start to make rules of how the store should be without thinking why the store is here, to serve customers.

I said that I understood, that as a young university student I’d worked in a service industry and I now reflect how over-the-top, officious even, we often became in bossing customers around. In that instance our excuse (it was an amusement park, with a large rollercoaster) was safety – but that was an excuse for slipping out of a customer service orientation into a production orientation.

We are all human. It takes training, and reminders, to stop us slipping into bad service habits.