Our Customers Tell Us...

In talks with marketing people about new software features, they sometimes use a phrase that runs along the lines of "Our users told us..." or "Responding to requests from our users...". It irritates me, because I know it's not true. Several hundred thousand people can't even agree on the time of day, let alone on improvements to software.

Today I finally came across a good way to describe the flaw in the "Our users" phrase: it is a case of "alleged consensus." In the high school English class in which we studied various forms of propaganda, I figure "Our users" falls into the category of "Join the Bandwagon" propaganda.

But there is the question of why. Why do marketing people feel the need to create the illusion that their entire customer base of 10,000 or 250,000 or 6 million are of one mind? I don't know the answer, but I wonder, why not just tell the truth: "These are the new features that our programmers came up with in time to make it into this release."

Comments

[Tony]

Well, if you're married the equivalent phrase is "They say...." followed by "Well, ALL my friends agree with me...."

[Mike]

And here in the south (US), "Responding to requests..." roughly translated would be, "Y'all are gonna want this."

[R. Paul Waddington]

Have we 'all' not heard the statement, from our children, "why not, everybody else is going/doing it...etc" ;-)

[Tony Tanzillo]

Autodesk routinely uses it to explain many of their actions.

While most know it's not the true reason in most cases, I suppose they expect us to just go along with the Kabuki dance.

[Evan Yares]

It's a compositional generalization. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies.

In any event, it's easier to say "our customers" than to say "Some of our customers."

Since you've been in this business for over 20 years, the marketing people probably figure you understand that they're generalizing.

Alternatively, it's possible that they are specifically making that generalization, because it effectively spins the company as being "customer driven," which is seen by many to be a good thing.

Interestingly, few real breakthroughs in technology have been customer driven. Most have come about through a combination of academic research, changes in enabling technology, individual inspiration, and plain old serendipity.

For some reason, I can't imagine a marketing person announcing a new product by saying "our customers told us they wanted a CAD program that doesn't suck..."

[Gareth Marshall]

As a software developer, I'm with Evan Yares on this one. Many of the things that we do in developing software relate to requests that have come to us from customers.

For what it's worth, the slogan for the very popular Mac text editor BBEdit is "It doesn't suck"