The Conversation

There were a lot of questions raised after the last post. Though none of them appear in the comments section here, people had pinged me on gtalk and mailed me about the same. Also when I had a talk with a Marketing/Branding Manager from CEAT (the place where I did my summer internship), he gave me a completely opposite or rather a very different perspective.

So the funda is fine that “Complacency” and “Retention” are related. But what kind of relationship is it…? Is complacency or retention just a consequence or an (un)intended side-effect of the other…?

For me, it is a cause and effect relationship where “complacency” is the cause which leads to the effect – “retention”. But then not many were ready to believe it. Many raised oppositions and amongst them, one of the most interesting and comprehensive talk is mentioned below. Its basically a summary of the discussion we had.

So I told Nitin about my interest of writing a paper on whether Complacency could be a root cause of retention. He immediately asked me about the subjects I had in this term as he knew that there would be something related to consumer psychology or behavior that made me think in this direction. But he also did remember that I had a marketing project (during summers) to understand the brand switch and brand retention drivers of high end truck tyre customers. So thought it might be a good option to carry forward the work already done. He was actually happy on knowing my intentions to write a paper but didn’t completely agree with the topic, the terms and the proposed relationship between the 2 terms. He didn’t think “complacency” was the right word. Also, he said these 2 don’t have a cause-and-effect relationship. Companies look for ways to make customers complacent. The target is to provide up-to-the mark product/service and make the customer stick to their brand. I did agree to some point that they want the customer to be satisfied. But then again the definition of complacency says that the customer is satisfied with himself/herself rather than with the product/service. I told him that a company targets customer service and it was because of their lack of enthusiasm to experiment, that they stick to the same brand. A few examples that we discussed will be mentioned in following posts to –

1. Inform the readers in detail about the discussions so that they can take an informed decision &

2. Justify my viewpoint and support the theme with examples.