Culture Shift: User To Client

Monday Note reporting: Fifteen years ago, Louis Gallois, the SNCF (French Railways) chairman decided to change the company’s lexicon: passengers were to be referred to as “customers” instead of the old bureaucratese “users” (in French: “clients” vs. “usagers”). The intent was to convey notions of choice and consideration for the rider. This being France, the edict led to convoluted debates. The upper management old guard held the company was on its way to betraying its traditional mission of service public. Unions—notoriously opposed to any forms of competition threatening their fiefdoms—saw the new word as a portent of evil mercantile designs...
The transforming media industry is still stuck into a user’s culture. Media companies still believe this: One way or another, they own their readers (or viewers and listeners). Of course, this belief is not evenly shared among different corporate layers. In the C-suite, the comfy old view is long gone as numbers confirm, quarter after quarter, the industry’s slump. Most executives share a sense of vital urgency. But the deeper you dive into those companies, the more you see complacency still lurking.
As long as the old media culture still dominates and resists change, better business models won’t be able to gain traction.
It all boils down to a simple market place evolution.
In the pre-internet era, the media sector lived by its own rules: a captive audience left with no other choice but a bunch of well-entrenched media outlets. At the time, these companies didn’t feel the need to probe their audiences, let alone to market to them. People were listening, viewing, and reading, roughly at the same rate, year in and year out. Editors and publishers felt immune to any form of challenge. Newsrooms were a great place to be, filled with witty, smart people, most of them notoriously unproductive, but great to hang out with, caring very little care for the user’s state of mind.
Then, the digital wave unfurled. With it came a new business culture, completely antinomic to the legacy media’s thinking. At first, the tech/startup way of doing things was dismissed as a freakishly geeky and completely inapplicable to media organizations...
http://www.mondaynote.com/2012/04/01/culture-shift-user-to-client/