When you’re selling an experience – even if it offers valuable solutions to your target demographic’s problems – having its value seem inaccessible or insufficient will turn off users every time. If your service frustrates someone, you give them the opportunity to consider, “Why can’t I use a different solution for this?” For software services and product lines that rely upon customer loyalty, bad user experiences can – and will – lose customers.

In a one-off industry such as traditional advertising, however, user impressions are perceived to trump user experience. Did someone see your product? Are they thinking about it? Has it entered their consciousness even before entering their household? The success of old-school advertising is quantified only in terms of purchases made, regardless of means. “Did they buy?”

The dairy industry knows a lot about the old model of advertising. Get some celebrity spokespeople to testify on behalf of milk, make sure that relativity of benefits to calcium amount is in fine print, dance around the issue of whether milk is responsible for early puberty trends, and get consumers to come back for round two. The California Milk Processing Board’s new campaign, however, is an example of what’s problematic about advertisers’ current respect for consumers, our respect for ourselves, and our respect for each other:

The campaign takes the cheeky tack of addressing itself to the men in women’s lives, on the grounds that women are not the only ones affected by premenstrual syndrome. [The campaign describes how studies have shown that the calcium in dairy milk can help reduce the symptoms of PMS.]

The approach is underlined by the centerpiece of the campaign, a microsite, or special Web site, that is ostensibly in the voice of a man whose wife or girlfriend is in the throes of PMS: “Everything I do is wrong.” (NYT)

The useless notion that a woman’s natural menstrual cycle must universally emasculate men is disappointing. However, as much of an issue here is partner Goodby’s response to whether disrespecting customers is a problem:

The idea, says Jeff Goodby…is to “enlist the spouse or significant other” of women to encourage them to drink milk.

“We did it in the past, but the women just didn’t drink enough milk,” he says, laughing. “If they’d only drink enough, we wouldn’t come back.”

Mr. Goodby was reminded of some criticism six years ago of the “Milk to the Rescue” commercial as sexist.

“I wish I could say everybody’s got a sense of humor since then,” he says.

The subject is “for many people an uneasy one to bring up, not fit for public discussion,” he adds. “When I tell female friends and relatives we’re doing a campaign on this, they go, ‘Uh, uh, are you sure?’ ”

But “my own small focus group has endorsed it,” Mr. Goodby says. “They’ve seen the work and they say it’s funny.” (NYT)

Maybe we can’t fix that Goodby is undervaluing the reactions and purchasing power of women, engaging gendered insecurities, and still subscribing to illusions about focus group significance. What we can fix, though, are our expectations of what we deserve from our advertisers (respect), what we deserve from our products (value), and what “user experience” we’re buying when we use a product or service.

For example, when I choose WePay over PayPal, I’m doing it because I like feeling like a valued customer who is worth working with. Their customer service is phenomenal, their philosophy compassionate, and I like how I feel when I use their services. In the case of choosing what kind of food¹ to buy, wouldn’t you rather choose the product which at least doesn’t suggest you should feel unreasonable or emasculated?

I encourage all consumers, producers, and people to respect themselves enough to demand good experiences from the products that they create and use, starting with the kind of advertising and marketing that they will accept. At the end of the day, the best products will win, in software and in food products. Where we can, let’s call out disrespect where we see it and acknowledge that it’s not irrelevant to consumer experience. Simply put, it makes a product worse.

On July 22, a week and a half after this article was posted, the advertising campaign in question was withdrawn after a social media firestorm.

1: Consider coconut, soy, or almond milk substitutes: more likely to be absent dangerous hormones, these also have the benefit of not exploiting gendered insecurities! Score! Also, try calcium substitutes to get its benefits, without the excess calories.

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