So How Rich Is Your Customer?

Can a company make its profits by making its customers richer? Can its prosperity be a direct function of its patron's prosperity?

The answer appears easy enough, but the reason why it is so, is not. Today, a majority of people will quickly answer yes to the top down drawdown of prosperity, but it was not always like this. What has happened is a paradigm shift in the way corporates do business, but let us first go back to the beginning.

In the socialistic era of the seventies, there was a clearly demarcated "prosperity line" - like the more familiar term poverty line - dividing the corporate and the worker. The latter were generally below this prosperity line, and the former lorded above it. A typical company jealously hoarded its profits, unwilling to share it with its workers. The workers had to scrounge for every rupee and had to remain content with the labels of white collar, blue collar and so on and so forth.

In the seventies, workers by and large trudged to their place of work (drudgery?) in poor public/private transport buses, or on their own. The more better-off scootered down, with their tiffin boxes dangling in the dickey.

Today? The very same white collar and blue collar workers zip down in their Pulsars and Maruti-800s and Santros. They are better dressed, more conscious of their time, their offices are flashy, and they expect the best from their boss (unlike in the past when it was the other way round - it was the boss who used to expect the best from his workers).

They (the workers) are more demanding, and expect tangible rewards that can be measured - preferably in terms of the paycheck.

The paycheck, not a pat on the back, is the barometer for the "knowledge worker" today. Well, much water has flown down the Ganga, because companies don't mind it too.

For progressive companies who have clued on to this paradigm shift, the internal mantra is 'money begets money'. That is, prosperous employees add to the company's bottom line.

The more progressive companies have pushed the envelope further, i.e. Prosperous CUSTOMERS also add to the company's balance sheet.