The Senior VP of Marketing at a Fortune 500 company told me he wanted his customers to feel like buying his product was the most logical decision they had ever made. He wanted his marketing research to ensure that his product would exactly fulfill its purpose and both meet and exceed the customer’s specific needs. He went on to describe how he wanted his follow-up service to his product to reinforce the buying decision at every level. He wanted his brand to become the symbol of satisfaction and to create customer loyalty. This vision and these goals had been the foundation on which he built his company’s marketing strategy.
Consider the difference between this approach and the average corporate safety program. Many companies still view their workers as safety’s problem rather than its customer. The goal is control, not marketing. Risk must be controlled through a hierarchical matrix addressing conditions, worker behavior and combinations of the two. Risk is eliminated or reduced conditionally through engineering and design, and worker behavior is controlled through the enforcement of rules and procedures. The safety department builds its product with no marketing research or customer input. Little or no thought is given to branding the safety effort. Compliance replaces customer satisfaction and there is no re-enforcing of the buying decision to be safe other other than discipline. Safety culture is often viewed simply as an informal consensus that somehow results in peer-to-peer enforcement of rules and procedures. This combination of objectives and activities is mistakenly labeled as a safety strategy.