This Tweet from @Zephoria caught my eye the other day.

It intrigued me because I use those terms daily and have done so with clients for years. Perhaps you do too.

The answer was wrapped in another question: why is the language of slavery being used to describe customer relationships?

The idea that I was casually using terms derived from the slave trade startled me and provoked another thought.

Imagine if these kind of words, used without question as part of normal business, were used in a company’s mission or vision statement? There would be a gasp, followed by a serious look at the share price.

I looked at a few mission and value statements from Fortune 500 companies and you find carefully crafted sentence crammed with abstract terms like “passionate, partnership, proud, curious, enrich, resourceful, accountable, unwavering, teamwork, committed, open”

I imagine if I look at the annual statements of mid caps and SMEs you’d find the same, certainly when I researched this a few years ago this was true.

The celebrated Cluetrain Manifesto of 2000 is often held up as the key text to challenge the orthodox view that the company owns the relationship with the customer.

I’d go further back to Professor Peter Sandman whose work around how consumers respond to companies who have crossed the invisible line of responsible behaviour is a more complete and detailed treatment.

With BP in the news this week I was reminded of his description of how BP responded to an oilspill on the Californian Coast just a few months after global outrage caused by the Exxon Valdez. BP’s CEO said “Our lawyers tell us it’s not our fault, but we feel like it’s our fault and we’re going to behave like it’s our fault”. The full explanation of the brilliance of this statement is described on Peter Sandman’s site.

The real question is, why 15 years since Sandman, 10 years after Cluetrain, the gulf between actions and words in the customer relationship is just as wide and possibly even wider?

Update: Since posting this a couple of hours ago, Peter Sandman has been in touch directly, to share a link to a BBC interview he did on May 3rd concerning BP’s response to the current crisis, together with a good bulleted breakdown of how he feels BP is responding and what it could to improve the situation.