Circuit City And Why Faking Never Works

Circuit City has been in hot water as of late, its place behind Best Buy in the electronics market is only overshadowed by its massive continuous loses over the past years. Their latest plan to turn things around is rebranding as The City. With a concept of smaller stores, interactive demonstrations of their products and store “guides” equipped with tablet computers, the company hopes to regain ground.

But there’s something wrong.

A job posting on Monster to work at The Citysays:

With a focus on putting our guests first, Circuit City is launching a new store concept called The City, which truly transforms the guest experience.  In The City, we treat guests like they matter by providing a personalized shopping experience that, with the help of enabling technology, expertly answers guests’ questions and meets their needs.

We treat guests like they matter? Like they matter? That’s the problem right there, you’re doing your best to pretend your guests matter. No matter how much effort you put into pretending it will never substitute a real culture of providing great customer experiences. Circuit City has been pretending to care for their customers for over a decade and ever since they’ve been lagging behind more and more.

Pretending never works as well as the real thing, just like it didn’t work back in high school, it doesn’t work in business, it doesn’t work in life. When you are not genuine people will call you on it, if you are lucky. Usually they will just stop caring about you.