Retailing - when did it go mad?

9 years ago I started a feedback company. In 2008 I left. In 2009 it went bust. What makes me sad is that it is needed as much today as it was back in 2000 because retailers still have virtually no idea what their customers think from day to day.

Generally retailers seem to have stuck to the same model even now through the economic downturn. The model works like this. Create a bucket with lots of holes. Spend lots of time and money filling it with customers and as long as you can shove customers in the top convince yourself everything will be OK.

Now despite every book on marketing clearly saying the cost of acquiring new customers is always greater than the cost of getting existing ones to spend money, someone somewhere has been ignoring this rule big time. In fact, many, many people have.

So why is this? I've been searching for a simple truth in all this for a while, and it was only after I got married did I hit on some bedrock of truth. The fruit of a relationship doesn't necessarily come easy. Relationships are kind of messy. Most squeaky clean brands seem to try to circumvent this basic truth. Further, people do desire relationships and connections with other things. Not those mechanical, CRM type relationships but what is essentially human.

So perhaps retailers should look at the bucket and plug the holes and try to make their brands more human.