Ignorance

Office anthropology™ →Go uptown If You Ignore It Long Enough, It Will Go Away (von Sachsen-Rampton, 1941) The JC puts on his pith-helmet, grabs his butterfly net and a rucksack full of marmalade sandwiches, and heads into the concrete jungleIndex: Click ᐅ to expand: Work anthropology Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

Ignore
/ɪɡˈnɔː/ (v.)
We learned from our mothers’ apron:

If you ignore something for long enough it will go away.

Dear old Grandma Contrarian demonstrated the sense in this adage countless times on the rambunctious young JC. To be sure, he could be — still can — quite the exasperating toe-rag, but pay his antics no mind and eventually he will go and bother someone else.

This is a lesson adopted by the modern customer services industry. Firms will tell you how much they value your feedback — usually from an unmonitored account — and then steer you to some fatuous net promoter score survey or customer questionnaire that seeks multi-choice answers to loaded questions designed to validate the company’s already-chosen strategy. This is modern “consultation”.

So much is well understood: this is the grim reality of consumer life in the networked economy.

But there is another kind of ignorance, which counts as a business strategy for businesses whose economics depend on mutualising upfront payments and then scaling.

If your customer has already paid everything you can expect it to pay, and if the deal is such that the customer is not necessarily expecting anything back, there is logic to ignoring customers who do claim, even validly, under the contract.

What kind of contract does a customer pay and then expect no product or service?