Anonymous Customers

March 30, 2005

Two press releases from today brought to mind the problem faced by many suppliers of products and services. See if you can guess what these two news items have in common:

Jacada Wins Significant Contract with Large Telecommunications Provider

PFSweb Contracted for Dedicated Call Center to Serve U.S., Canadian Customers of Consumer Electronics Firm

Yes, in each case the (no doubt smaller and more desperate) supplier was not able to get permission to identify the name of the (no doubt larger and holding-most-of-the-cards) customer. Having done stints as a PR copywriter, I can sympathize with the poor suppliers in both of these cases. You've made a big sale to an important customer and for whatever reason you're not able to crow about it and milk it for publicity -- drat!

I suppose in some cases the big customer might have a legitimate concern -- maybe they don't want to reveal some aspect of their business strategy to competitors. Wouldn't it be a shame, though, if the insistence on anonymity was just the result of somebody throwing their weight around to show how much power they have? Think that could ever be the case?

AB -- 3/30/05

Related Tags: customer