How to seduce your client. Thanks and regards
“Apologies for the delay...”
“Thank you for your approval.”
“Please let us know your feedback.”
“Please suggest a convenient time...”
“Sorry for not being able to respond earlier...”
If you ever want your client to get off thanks to you, start your emails to them with any of the above lines. This is softcore porn for them. Can you make your senior apologise on your behalf? That’s hardcore porn. Your CEO is involved and trying to avert a crisis caused by you? That’s the best quality BDSM porn out there.
Power does strange things to people but I find this among the weirdest that happens to Indian clients. The moment a person dons the hat of a client, he or she changes overnight. Instead of getting off on good old porn or human sexual experiences, they start enjoying themselves in the misery of their agencies or vendors.
I’ve been to many a meeting as a part of the agency team, where we are apologising for a goof-up and the client is getting more and more aroused. You can notice signs like increased heart rate, sweating, excited yelling, dominance, and a wait for the climax when they come on top of you. No pun intended.
Anthropologists must study this human behaviour that’s evolving in India. Never before have we seen anything like this happening in any part of the world. We have evidence that even the British were not this twisted when their power was at peak with the East India Company.
I even doubt if Hitler got a boner every time a Jew was murdered.
Indian clients are a different breed altogether. Not only are they the most averagely talented amongst their global peers but they tend to believe that they know it all. I think this has something to do with their upbringing; most of them are MBAs from leading B-schools in India where they don’t really learn much about management.
But they do become experts in using Microsoft Office, using the best industry jargon, earning money they don’t deserve, spending excess money they undeservedly earned, and just viewing all other humans as losers.
I’ve had clients complain because they saw a typo in an email. For heaven’s sake, it’s an internal email which can afford to have a typo once in a while. In fact, I think it’s completely human if an agency makes a rare mistake and publishes something on Facebook and Twitter with an error.
A typo somewhere or a wrong image someplace else, sometimes, just sometimes is okay. Because it’s okay to make mistakes sometimes. Even the audiences online understand that the brands on social media platforms are not run by robots but by humans like them who are capable of making silly mistakes every now and then.
This one time, a client actually threatened the agency that it will sue because its senior was getting RSVP emails on his ID to an event where he himself invited everyone (we had sent the invite email on his behalf).
“Do you think I’m a security guard keeping count of everyone’s attendance?” was the response.
There are many and plenty of incidents like these where clients act unreasonably. From “Please do as the client says” or “I don’t like it so I’d like to see a new version and I don’t have any further feedback” to “if I have to do everything myself then what am I paying you for?”, we’ve heard, read, and seen it all.
I think it’s high time we called out this toxic culture which is propagated further by agencies by saying things like “that’s how the industry is, you’ll get used to it” or “Oh you haven’t seen the worst”. I mean, agency folk revel in such stories where they talk about crisis after crisis while they’re having whiskey after whiskey on a Friday night at a Gurgaon ahaata.
But it’s time. We must unite against such atrocities. We will not stand against clients who have our pictures in their bathrooms and bedrooms with fake tears drawn on top of them being used for self-pleasuring activities.
They must go back to watching porn or spending time with their partners instead of making our lives hell just so that they can orgasm. I can vouch for my agency to stand against this evil as we have had enough.
I want other agencies to come out and stand with us as well and say #WeToo.