When Corporations Met Their Customers

Do You Like Your Customers… Or Is It Just Transactional?

Can corporations and customers be friends?

To some people, it will sound strange even asking this question. Of course, I'm giving it a When Harry Met Sally spin, but let's try it from a different angle:

Do you like your customers?

Are you interested in your customers beyond just what it takes to get a sale?

Would you want to have conversations with your customers even if you didn't think it could improve your bottom line?

These days, if we're being honest, we have to admit that most businesses, and most people working in business, don't really like their customers that much.

I'm not saying that businesses hate their customers, but for the most part, people in business don't want to spend time with their customers. The only reason they interact with customers is when there's an economic advantage to doing so.

I know, some people are going to say that economic advantage is what businesses exist for, that the entire purpose of business-customer relations is to move people forward in a funnel toward concrete economic transactions.

You could also say that the purpose of a marriage is to create and raise children. A lot of people do say that these days. If you're one of them, I'm sorry to say that I think you're missing the point.

If you say that the purpose of your business is to produce profit, I think that you're missing the point too.

Do you look forward to talking with your customers, or seek to avoid them?

When I think about the state of relationships between businesses and their customers these days, I think about a conversation I had a few weeks ago with a former colleague of mine. She's working for a big pharmaceutical company now, a company that I've done a lot of work with in the past.

What she told me is that her company simply doesn't do market research anymore. This year, they completely eliminated their market research budget. Someone at the company discovered that it was possible to create a plausible-looking marketing plan using generative AI tools, without ever interviewing a single customer. So, the company stopped talking to doctors, stopped talking to caregivers, and stopped talking to patients.

As soon as someone figured out how to get ChatGPT to write a plausible marketing plan, the company stopped doing market research. The marketing teams seemed to feel relief about not having to spend any more time listening to doctors, caregivers, and patients talk about their experiences. It's as if the people working at this pharmaceutical company saw customers as nothing more than sources of valuable market data, and regarded talking to customers as a necessary annoyance.

The people at this business had the attitude of married couples who only have sex for the purpose of making a baby. They felt no thrill in their commerce.

It's not just a shame that this pharmaceutical company is so uninterested in its own customers. It's also dangerous. Market research interviews are an important means for pharmaceutical corporations to find out about side effects caused by their medications that aren't revealed during clinical trials. Generative AI simulations run with so-called synthetic users won't reveal these adverse events, because they're just a rehash of pre-existing data. People will die because market research isn't being done - not with every medication, but it will happen.

Do the people working at this pharmaceutical company care about this risk? Maybe they do, a little bit, but not enough to do something about it. They don't care about the danger to their customers as much as they care about the opportunity to save money.

Would you still claim that a corporation exists merely to maximize its profits? If so, I ask you to read the following statement issued this year by Purdue Pharma:

"In March 2025, Purdue Pharma L.P. filed a new Chapter 11 Plan of Reorganization and related disclosure statement with the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. True to the vision Purdue articulated at the outset of the bankruptcy, a new public benefit company, 100% devoted to improving the lives of Americans, will be created upon emergence."

That's the statement that's currently at the top of the Purdue Pharma web site at PurduePharma.com.

The people at Purdue cared more about making a profit than they cared about their customers. So, they marketed addictive opioids to the max. They pushed patients to take opioid painkillers more than was necessary. They pushed doctors to prescribe opioids when they weren't needed. They pushed opioids in order to make as much of a profit as they could, not caring that they were creating a nationwide crisis in opioid addiction.

The irony is that in pursuit of profit, Purdue Pharma destroyed its business. Purdue Pharma, and the Sackler family that controlled the company, have been ordered to pay $7.4 billion to make up for the massive social harm caused by their profit-centered approach to business.

When a business doesn't care about its customers, and deals with them in merely transactional ways, people notice, and people get turned off. It's not just customers who notice, either. Employees notice, too. A company that cares more about profit than people won't stop at short-changing its customers. It will squeeze its employees in cruel ways as well, or just get rid of them altogether.

People working at such businesses never feel safe. They don't trust that their colleagues have their backs. They feel miserable coming in to the office. They feel no true sense of belonging to a company, no common cause, no esprit de corps. So, they'll make professional decisions according to what profits them as individuals, rather than what's best for the company.

That's how you end up with a company like Purdue Pharma, both morally and financially bankrupt.

The movie When Harry Met Sally asked whether men and women can ever be just friends. The answer is that they can... with the twist that people find the deepest romantic love by first being interested enough in other people to just spend time with them, talking, walking, eating, shopping. The kissing can come later.

Can businesses and customers be friends? Of course they can... with the twist that businesses build the most economically sustainable brands by first building relationships of trust and respect. The sales can come later.

It's old fashioned of me to talk this way, I know. It's out of touch with the way that business works these days. It's not innovative. I don't care.

The truth is that I don't want to do business with sociopaths who are only interested in making their numbers go up. They're not curious about other people. That makes them poor company.

The companies I enjoy working with are those who begin by wanting to know more about their customers. They don't want to just map the most direct route to a sale. They want to know about how customers live, what they do, how they think, and how they feel. That's because they actually like their customers.

When you like someone, you want to spend time with them.

You don't spend time with them just because you think you'll get something out of it.

When you do spend time with people you like, however, you always get something out of it.

There are still businesses that actually like their customers. They employ people who are looking for excuses to spend more time with their customers.

You don't hear a lot about people in business who feel this way, because they're not the sort to waste time boasting about themselves. They're too busy enjoying their work, taking time to learn from their customers.

They do market research projects with one-on-one interviews because they can't stand the thought of going through a business quarter without spending time with their customers. They go beyond quick 5-minute customer service surveys, because why would anyone spend only 5 minutes with someone they like?

They love when their customers say things that don't make rational sense. They love it when their customers take ten minutes to describe what it's like to place an order. They love that little wrinkle in the words their customers use to describe when their favorite brands drive them crazy. They love that after a day of market research interviews, they can still hear customers' voices in their heads. They love that their customers are the first people they want to talk to in the morning, and it's not because it's the end of the fiscal year, and it's not because their managers are pushing them to meet some new crazy quota. They do market research because when you realize that you want to spend the rest of your career understanding your customers, you want the rest of your career to begin as soon as possible.