Dating and business: Not All that different

Just as healthy individual relationships require constant monitoring and care, the new paradigm for company and customer relationships values greater symmetry of power and dialogue.

We’ve all fallen victim to or been perpetrator of the classic dating power play – waiting just a few days longer before calling. But this tactic can teach companies a thing or two on how they should be dealing with their customers.

The “principle of least interest,” developed by sociologist Willard Willer from his studies of dating relationships among college undergraduates in the early 20th century, explains that how we feel about a relationship with another person depends on our perceptions of fairness or level of investment in that relationship.

The party who holds the most power in that relationship is the one who is (or appears) least invested or interested. The power of “least interest” stems from an ability to exploit that difference in interest during various interactions, ranging from negotiations over the purchase of something desirable, to convincing your boss to give you a raise, to landing a date for Saturday night.

It may not sound surprising to suggest that most of us jockey for power in our business and personal relationships. The real insight comes from understanding the patterns of behavior that we fall into while pursuing the power of “least interest.”

The power of least interest can cause people to cloak themselves in indifference rather than take the effort and the risks needed to build relationships based on trust. Escaping these zero-sum power games requires a willingness to be vulnerable and honest with yourself and others, to recognize and manage power imbalances while not allowing them to consume you. This is a tall but critical order in a world where our physical and virtual connections to others (and their associated power dynamics) are only growing more complicated.

These lessons hold true not just for individuals but for entire organizations as well.

While you might assume that companies whose products impose high switching costs, or whose services were wildly popular would hold the trump card in their relationships with customers. Yet these examples seem to demonstrate that the tide of power is turning in consumers’ favor, and that the trend may be accelerating.

These lessons apply to our dating lives, too.

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Amid the increased prominence of social media, consumers’ ability to learn from each other and to mobilize as a larger group has increased exponentially. Through this increased connectivity, consumers complement their relationships with companies by adding relationships with each other.

So, the company’s power of least interest has grown weaker, as it no longer manages a set of isolated customer relationships where it holds a power position, but instead must confront a web of connected players that are increasingly capable of asserting themselves as a group.

Netflix’s business analysts no doubt predicted that there would be some small, but acceptable, level of customer attrition after its Qwikster spinoff announcement (a plan it abandoned later), but it failed to gauge how the negative customer reaction would continue to compound itself via news coverage and online community discussion until customer departures totaled 800,000 by the end of the third quarter, delivering untold damage to the Netflix brand.

Just as healthy individual relationships require constant monitoring and care, the new paradigm for company and customer relationships values greater symmetry of power and dialogue between groups over issues that matter, and the willingness to reconsider things when results or reactions are not as expected. Like any love affair you want to last, it requires patient, hard work and the willingness to put power games aside to have real conversations.

–  yourlife1st.com

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