Customer Orientation is Employee Orientation

November 25, 2024
by Noriyuki Morimoto

The issue of working-style reform is not one of physical working hours, but of mental working hours. Long hours of tedious work, which is in no way enjoyable, will exhaust us not only physically but also mentally. Time spent having fun will seem shorter, and time spent not having fun will seem longer. The first priority is to make work enjoyable.

This is not only a matter of feeling: it is also important that people become creative and resourceful when they enjoy what they do. Ingenuity leads to improved work efficiency, which, in a true sense, leads to shorter working hours. Therefore, ingenuity itself also becomes enjoyable.

There is joy in recommending to clients what you believe in and what you are fond of. At the very least, there should be no mental burden of self-disguise. On the other hand, forcing yourself to recommend something you don’t believe in, know the flaws of, or dislike simply for the sake of making a living, is not enjoyable and will only cause you to become mentally unwell.

With a good product as its premise, shouldn’t true advertising be about releasing the power of creating demand that only a good product possesses? Then, the true client of an advertising agency is not the client, but the client’s customers. Trying to satisfy the client is not always enjoyable and sometimes painful. However, thinking about customer-oriented advertising from the standpoint of the true client is enjoyable. At least, it is not painful.

However, the advertising industry must have long ago forgotten the philosophy of advertising. If the business has lost sight of the true customers of its advertisements, creating advertisements only to please its clients and consequently forcing its employees to work long and painful hours, and if the essential pathology of the business is reduced to a superficial problem of working hours, there is no future for the business.

Customer-orientation and employee-orientation have something in common in that they are ways to deny company-orientation. The contact point of a customer is not an abstract company, but a flesh-and-blood human being who works there. Customers are also human beings, and even corporate customers are represented by the real people who work there. As long as common values are created between human beings, both parties can enjoy the process, which is both customer-oriented and employee-oriented at the same time.

 

[Category /Fiduciary Duty]