niceness part 1

I believe that profitable brands, the successful people in business, and strong consumer strategies, are winning by being nicer than the competition. By nicer I mean more honest, trying to give people stuff they actually want, and generally doing-unto-others-as-you-would-have-them-do-unto-you.




A vampire bat will sometimes feed another unrelated, malnourished bat some regurgitated blood. It does this because it may reap the same favour in return one day. Why don't the bats 'cheat', taking free blood and never replaying the favour? How does this behaviour evolve? Scientists have simulated this to investigate the general "is it better to cheat, or play fair" question, and the answer depends on 3 factors:

1. how often the bats interact with each other
If you only plan to interact with a customer once, like a Nigerian 419 email fraudster, then cheating can be a profitable strategy. However, as we've all been told, it costs 5-10 times as much to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one. So if you want to establish a brand within a market and have loyal customers, then being nice is the only option.

2. how well the bats can recognise each other and remember past behaviour
We take this for granted now amongst consumers. Aside from my friend who got ripped of by the same 'moneychanger' (took cash and ran away) in Vietnam twice in 2 days, our memories are good and we remember brands that have done bad things or wronged us.

The kicker on this though, is that the nature of communications these days, especially the Internet, means that every Ebay seller or Amazon re-seller is branded by the feedback of all the bats customers he has sold to. Every brand has a review, or a story about it generated by a user somewhere on the web - for good or bad. This is the power of our collective memory.

So not only is it much harder to get way with cheating, your good behaviour is equally rewarded, making niceness an even more compelling strategy.

3. the extent to which the bats can punish the bad behaviour, e.g. by not giving blood to a known 'cheater', or biting him to death
The worst thing that bats do to a cheater is refuse to feed them, or in extreme cases, chase them out of the batcave. As we're well aware though, consumers today have more power than ever before to punish brands or slate products.

Extreme examples include a video of a Comcast technician falling asleep on a customer's couch:

(seen by over a million people)

or a single blogger causing the the shutdown of a camera e-commerce site after he complained about their hard sell tactics.

And similarly, consumers have the power to reward as well as punish.

this clip made it into National Press

If you add these factors into the equation, then total niceness really is the only option.

The Internet, far from being a vehicle for anonymity and deceit, has made reptuation more important than ever before. Since the whole web is a big conversation of links, comments and posts, if you keep being nasty, you have to keep hiding and reinventing yourself. And you'll be overtaken by all the nice people with their huge stock of nice things said about them.

This doesn't just apply to commerce on the Internet - it applies to any system where it's getting easier for people to find information, easier to get recommendations, and easier to connect to more people. Which is the whole world.

Next part:
Nice Strategies - if niceness is the universal currency of communications, how do we best use it?