Polpo fiction OR The customer is always… somewhere

If you’re eating out, how do ensure it’s a good night out –before you go?

Have a look at this…

‘We had a complaint that the chicken soup was bland.. ours is very authentic…it’s supposed to be comfort food… a little bland... the customer is always right but here he’s wrong so I refunded the cost of his dinner –why don’t you try the chicken soup..’ he says to the reviewer/critic who responds ‘It needs salt’. The reviewer (Rachel Cooke Observer 17/6) then writes ‘He shuts his eyes and shakes his head sadly… the fools he must suffer…’  

He is Russell Norman, owner of the rave-reviewed and incredibly popular restaurant, Polpo (Beak St) and now Polpetto (Dean ST), da Polpo (Convent Garden), Spuntino and Mishkin’s. All up and running successfully in roughly two years. Norman says that clarity about customers is his priority: he needs a certain kind of customer, cool, young professionals who drop in, rather than those seeking ‘a fancy pants destination’. They are his ‘long term customers’. So he adopted a no-booking policy (except for lunch). Controversial? Norman says ‘If you want to book, go where they take reservations’. The critic said he ‘couldn’t care less’ about critics of this policy. So this means customers more than likely have to wait to eat there. How does that square with the opening sentence above?

 My new Book Managing Value in Organisations: New Learning, Business and Management  http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&title_id=10805&edition_id=14285   Models, claims that for faster development, organisations need to reinvent all three together.  A key element of their business model (the choices made about how organisational value is created, delivered and captured) is the customer value proposition –and how this is built between supplier and customer. How is customer value created here?    

The chicken soup and no booking policy could be about owner cockiness, strength of vision or stubborn passion, but are fundamentally about the relationship between what Polpo provides and what the customer wants. ‘Customer need’ seems straightforward but how it is constructed and met, and how customer value is created, is anything but. For instance, when Henry Ford asked customers what they wanted from his first cars, they said ‘a faster horse’; or as Apple’s Steve Jobs put it, ‘A lot of the time, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them’; or Peter Drucker ‘The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it is selling to him.’  

 Customers might ‘know what they want’ but there is invariably some negotiation involved in getting it. For instance, with customer privacy on Facebook, customers framed their ‘need’- to connect with their chosen others in a self-advantageous way - and acceptably traded privacy for it. Thus need is exchangeable, with value a ‘product’ mutually created between them both. In this way ‘need’ becomes a new commodity. The lesson for other organisations: ‘value’ and need are advantageously slippery (encouraging both provider and customer to continually try to seek it): customer need is of infinite variety and immensely negotiable.   

How will Norman sustain current success? He is aware that to get what they want customers have traded far greater things than their time. But who will play the longer waiting game – and at what point will time and value fragment, rather than as now, coalesce?

In the creation of fashionable taste waiting is now an ingredient. I wonder for how long –and what Grayson Perry would make of it!   

Does this shed any new light on ‘value’? What do you think?