Guest article by Rebekah Russell-Bennett.
When the ancient Greek mathematician and inventor Archimedes ran down the street naked shouting ‘Eureka’ after discovering that water displacement was the clue to solving the problem of determining the density of the king’s crown, little did he know that this term would echo through the millennia. We now use the term to describe moments of excitement when we realise we have discovered the answer to a puzzling problem. The puzzling problem that I want to tell you about was how to conceptualise customer vulnerability in a way that gave rise to dignity for the people I wanted to support. So let me tell you the tale.
Way back in the early 2000s I switched from working with commercial customers to customers who interacted with government and non-profit services. One of the reasons for this switch was my introduction to the field of social marketing by my colleague at University of Queensland Dr Josephine Previte who applied commercial marketing techniques to social problems such as disengagement with free preventative health services and over-consumption of alcohol. As I commenced research in social marketing services, I used the mainstream marketing terminology including vulnerable consumers (more on this later). Over the years I did more and more work in the area of customer vulnerability but I didn’t engage theoretically with the area, rather I treated customers experiencing vulnerability as a cohort rather than a phenomenon in it’s own right. My first wake-up call was working with Dr Rowan Bedggood, who was an academic leading the Group of Energy Efficiency Researchers Australia. Rowan conducted research with Indigenous communities and regularly took students on study trips to a remote Aboriginal community to understand how to work effectively with Indigenous peoples. She knew what I did not, that nobody experiencing vulnerability wants to be labelled as vulnerable, nor did they want to labelled as powerless and needing to be rescued. It was our joint article about the resources brought by customers to energy hardship (Glavas et al 2019) where she gave me a choice, “Rebekah, you either stop using a deficit perspective in this paper or I am out”. I had never heard of the deficit perspective but quickly learnt that this perspective views customers as powerless and focuses on what customers lack. The alternative that Rowan explained was a strengths-based approach which recognises that even in challenging circumstances, customers or other actors in the service ecosystem have strengths, resilience, and assets that can be leveraged to navigate or mitigate vulnerability.
My understanding of a strengths-based approach was further deepened when I worked with Professor Maria Raciti, an Indigenous social marketing academic, on writing up a nationally funded project to widen participation in the tertiary sector for people experiencing disadvantage. We used a co-design approach to develop animal personas to represent different types of students, teachers and parents from marginalised areas, and when writing up these findings for scholarly publications, we realised that we needed to develop a new definition of customer vulnerability so we could avoid using definitions that included deficit language such as ‘powerless’ and ‘lack’ that permeated all existing definitions (Raciti et al 2022). We also deliberately used the term customer rather than consumer to go beyond individuals who were users and include individuals who played other roles in the service process.
The Eureka moment for me was actually when all this knowledge culminated in the project I lead that aimed to maintain secure housing for mature women called The Women’s Butterfly Project. This project was originally entitled “preventing homelessness for mature women” which used the deficit term ‘homelessness’ and depicted women as being at risk (another deficit term). Working with a senior professor justice, Professor Melissa Bull, I discovered that a strengths-based approach had decades of research outside of the business field – from education to psychology to criminology. The scales fell from my eyes when I observed that even though I had developed a strengths-based definition of customer vulnerability (Raciti et al 2022) I was still intentionally using deficit assumptions and terms. The eureka moment was when I realised that the only way to shift from a deficit to a strengths-based approach was to have explicit checklists, glossaries and guidelines that provided guardrails to keep me on track. I wrote about this revelation process in a special issue on consumer vulnerability (Russell-Bennett et al 2023). I was also pleased to hear from my friend and colleague Professor Sertan Kabadayi who had his own Eureka moment when reading my work on a strengths-based approach to customer vulnerability and used it when he gave the final lecture for a graduating class of students and published the dignity-vulnerability framework (Kabadayi, Livne-Tarandach, R. and Pirson 2023).
So like Archimedes, I was so excited about the discovery of the strengths-based approach and the need to avoid labelling people as vulnerable, that I metaphorically ‘ran naked’ through the academic world with my final editorial in Journal of Services Marketing coauthored with my two inspirations; Rowan and Maria (Russell-Bennett, Bedggood and Raciti 2024). I wanted to share my realisation and maybe help other services marketing academics who research customer vulnerability have their own eureka moment.
Footnote: Being courageous and challenging the status quo is never comfortable, so when you go running ‘naked’ through the academic world, be prepared for people to react defensively or in shock. I would tell you more about the reactions from reviewers and other researchers in the field of customer vulnerability, but that dear reader is a different tale ????.
References
Glavas, C., Letheren, K., Russell-Bennett, R., McAndrew, R., & Bedggood, R. (2020). Exploring the resources associated with consumer vulnerability: Designing nuanced retail hardship programs. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 57, Article number: 102212 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretconser.2020.102212
Kabadayi, S., Livne-Tarandach, R. and Pirson, M. (2023), “A dignity-vulnerability approach framework to maximize well-being outcomes by transformative service initiatives (TSIs)”, Journal of Services Marketing, Vol. 37 No. 9, pp. 1151-1166. https://doi.org/10.1108/JSM-03-2023-0110
Raciti, M. M., Russell-Bennett, R., & Letheren, K. (2022). A strengths-based approach to eliciting deep insights from social marketing customers experiencing vulnerability. Journal of Marketing Management, 38(11–12), 1137–1177. https://doi.org/10.1080/0267257X.2022.2092196
Russell-Bennett, R., Bedggood, R. and Raciti, M.M. (2024), “Editorial: Stop saying “vulnerable consumers/customers”!”, Journal of Services Marketing, Vol. 38 No. 5, pp. 509-521. https://doi.org/10.1108/JSM-04-2024-0190
Russell-Bennett, R., Kelly, N., Letheren, K., & Chell, K. (2023). The 5R Guidelines for a strengths-based approach to co-design with customers experiencing vulnerability. International Journal of Market Research, 65(2-3), 167-182. https://doi.org/10.1177/14707853231151605
Professor Rebekah Russell-Bennett
Associate Dean Research
Faculty of Business, Government and Law
University of Canberra
Australia
