By Stanley Bing

Dear Stanley,

I work in an advertising agency. I don't belong because I can't figure out this one seemingly important thing: How do you give up your common sense and blindly do whatever the client tells you? I don't want to do that, but everybody around me is quite adept at it. What are the secrets?


Too Much Integrity


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Dear Too Much,

Perhaps you should be in another field. Like one that doesn't deal with customers very much. You sound grumpy, and I detect a bad attitude toward your clients. Maybe you should be a security analyst or professional wrestler. They don't mind hurting other people's feelings or body slamming innocent victims in order to make a living.

Let me describe to you what a proper customer-focused attitude is. First, you love the customer, no matter how smelly, stupid, or demented he, she, or they might be. They are your customer. You venerate them. You know that without them, there would be nothing left of you. You dream of new ways to please him, her, or them. Second, when there is a problem with your customer, you are not filled with resentment. You wrack your brains day and night to think of new ways to solve the problem. Finally, you search within yourself constantly to find pockets of anger, condescension, and negativity toward your beloved client. You root them out and replace them with respect and affection.

The way you feel about your client should not be all that different than the way you feel about your dog. And I mean that in the best possible way. Your dog may be good sometimes and bad at others, may make you proud one day and pee on the floor the next. You still love him, nurture him, feed and water him, and would never put him out in the cold. If he got lost you would scour the world to find him. That's what you should feel about your customer, even when he's as stupid, ailing, and outlandishly ill-behaved as my Cocker Spaniel.

In short, your question is coming from the wrong place. A better one would be, “How can I train my customer to be a better customer, the better to serve his or her advertising needs?” There are several answers to that one:

Listen better. Your client may not know his armpit from a hole in the ground, but he does know his product and what vision he has for it. If you disagree with it, okay for you, but that doesn't mean you don't need to understand where he's coming from. If I had an advertising agency and they didn't listen to me, I'd fire them right away.

Be patient. You're going to need to cajole, persuade, influence, and guilt your clients into doing what you think is best for them. You're not going to get there by hitting them over the head with a figurative newspaper.
Consider the alternatives. Are you right? Are you sure? Or are you just a grouchy, self-promoting artiste in love with his own concepts?

Act with love. Whatever you do — even if it's quit in a huff because your genius is ignored — do it not for your own gratification but for the ideals that should be guiding your career no matter what field you're in: honesty, creativity, and profit. Just because you can't do what the client may want doesn't mean either of you is wrong. You're just not right for each other. In short, it's the old break-up song that goes “It's Not Me, It's You.”
Meanwhile, you don't seem to have a very good ‘tude about your colleagues, either. Hmm. Bad clients. Suck-up colleagues. Maybe the problem is with you, Sparky.

Stanley Bing is the bestselling author of Executricks, What Would Machiavelli Do?, Sun Tzu Was a Sissy, 100 Bullshit Jobs...And How to Get Them, and many other books. For more Bing wisdom read his monthly column in Fortune and visit stanleybing.com.