Jun 17, 2015
By: David Fikes, Vice President, Consumer/Community Affairs and Communication, Food Marketing Institute Nice Guys Finish First

Baseball great Leo Durocher once quipped, “Nice guys finish last,” offering a cultural assessment that a concern for others, putting other’s needs first,  and being pleasantly agreeable somehow inhibited the ability to really compete effectively.  His summation captured the business and athletic attitude that there’s no place for nice, if you want to succeed.  With all due respect to Mr. Durocher, I think he was wrong.
   
In her acceptance speech of the 2015 Esther Peterson award, Wakefern Food Corporation’s Cheryl Macik told the story of how early in her customer service career an executive introduced her as “the nice person who takes care of our customers.”  At that point she felt the words were something of a putdown – a demeaning indication that her role was insignificant to the larger success to the company.  However, in the intervening years, as she witnessed Wakefern embrace a culture of customer service and become focused on the consumer experience, she came to recognize that being nice was the greatest gift of all.
 
Nice people are sometimes perceived as being naïve and easy to take advantage of.  That may be the case with some, but the consumer affairs and customer service professionals I work with on a daily basis are among the brightest, most savvy individuals on the face of the planet. They know people.  They know the way the world works, they simply choose to embrace it with a “studied naiveté.”  They choose to be nice, because they know in the end, nice is the better option. In the world of retailer-customer relations, a win-lose approach simply doesn’t work.  Even when you know you’re right, if you prove the consumer wrong, you may have won the fight, but you’ve likely lost a customer. The better tact is to be nice, and work harder to find a solution that makes both the company and the customer feel like winners.  In Cheryl’s words, that requires you “to be smart, tenacious, creative ----- and nice.” In the retail world, nice folks come in first.