The Electronic Engagement Blog

Electronic engagement isn’t just about connections. It’s about power, too.

As consumers, we often feel good about the idea that companies take us seriously, and are customer-centric, and are all about customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, and blahdy blahdy blah blah blah.

Truth is, nice concept, really rare to see an example.

Well, in a satisfying instance of “the keyboard is mightier than the price elasticity study that suggests that our customers are so stupid they’ll actually pay us to not put on this crap that we put on their computers because we get money for it so actually it’s like getting paid twice,” Sony has announced that it will no longer charge its customers (at least, its customers who opt for the Windows Vista Business Edition — a $100 upgrade) a $50 fee to remove the bloatware/crapware/craplets. So nice of you Sony. Well done. Well, hold on, not exactly.

Seems the only reason Sony made this move is because so many blogs (engadget’s headline: “Sony Hates You”) reacted with such vehemence over the idea of Sony actually charging customers to remove crap that they didn’t ask for or want on their computers in the first place (that also, by the way, causes conflicts and poor system performance) that the company kind of had no choice.

For a nice pithy story about it, check today’s Wired blog entry.

Sony still acts like the arrogant, couldn’t-care-less-about-customers company that it is (so you’ll take off the $50 fee to remove crapware if I pay you $100 for an upgrade? Hmm, let me do some math on this…), but at least in this one instance many customers have spoken and their voices have been heard and acted upon. But only because of a critical mass of blogs that speak for customer and potential customers at large.

That’s ePower. And we’re just beginning to learn how to use it.

By the way, lest you think I’m Sony-bashing just for fun, know that I used to be a Sony evangelist — every e-thing I had was Sony — laptop, peripherals, camera, voice recorder, Clie — and it’s this kind of crap that made me stop being a customer.

ePower means that first you vote with your fingers (tell the world when you think a company is dealing unfairly), and then with your wallet (become someone else’s customer). That’s the kind of power that every company respects.

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Tags: customer experience, e-Marketing, electronic engagement, marketing

This entry was posted on Friday, March 21st, 2008 at 9:49 pm and is filed under eMarketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.