Who is our customers

To the casual observer, it may look as if you can just pick it up and make some adjustments or move it over there. But in fact, all the thinking and strategy that should serve as the foundation for the physical brand are attached—or they should be if the work has been done correctly. This means that moving it is rarely as simple as it seems. This CEO did not realize what he was asking or that his starting point was an assumption that he was the customer.

By asserting that his tastes are paramount, he was also unintentionally insinuating that he is the most important customer for the brand. The actual customer was not in the room and was, therefore, forgotten. The personal tastes of the CEO do matter, of course, but more important is the strategy behind the visual execution with respect to what will appeal to the customer.

So with the CEO lacking the tools to step into the shoes of the customer, we were left at an impasse with a good bit of wasted time and money.

How can this be avoided? They are not—unless they have been fully equipped with the knowledge of what the customer values see Customer Personas and Competitive Advantage Diagrams or unless your stars have aligned in just to the right way and what the customer values is exactly the same as what is of value to those in the room. In most decision-making environments, very important people are difficult to overrule.

This issue is made worse when it comes to emotionally charged decisions like logo selection. Within the business world, there are many well-developed marketing operations. These typically have at their disposal careful customer research, which is applied using a professional marketing team that is fully authorized to both collect and act in accordance with this customer intelligence. Smaller organizations, however, are often without such resources or they lack the discipline for this kind of work and so they often fall into this customer misattribution trap.

Sometimes, this is done again and again. These five questions are outlined in the context of marketing in the accompanying free downloadable below.

It should never be about the personal opinions or tastes of those in the room, no matter how much authority their position represents. Your email address will not be published. Our consulting-driven Brand Pyramid Tutorial leverages 23 years of experience to help you clarify your brand essentials. Answers are abundant.

The right questions are few. Click below to sign up for our mailing list and get access to our library of downloadable PDFs, including a guide on the 5 most essential questions as postulated by Peter Drucker. Related Posts.

Finding out what you need to know in order to have a proper marketing strategy is not easy or cheap, but I can pretty much guarantee that what's far more costly is executing a marketing plan without a strategy to guide it.

A persona is a kind of mental model—an imaginary person with a name, history and story who has a way of doing things. A persona should have enough psychological detail to allow you to conveniently step over to the persona's view, and see your products and services from her perspective. Do Performance Reviews Have to Suck? Do performance reviews have to suck?

Start listening, stay curious. Each piece of information about your idea is precious, especially negative feedback. Having done that, there are a few ways to systematize this knowledge, build this up together and put it into practice. When our product was launched, we analysed our first customers very carefully. The knowledge that we have now helps us today build better relationships with customers, speak their language and precisely point out the benefits that they are looking for.

Our team has defined a few general profiles of the prospective customers. Earlier, we had set several criteria such as: company size, industry, country, decision-maker. Our task will be to fill each field with our ideas and suggestions. I will be still referring to our first company profile as an example:. Write down all possible options.

In our case the business environment include:. We have defined:. What problems does our customer face within the above-mentioned processes? We have written down:. We propose practical solutions. Obviously, every customer has different requirements, face different problems. However, systemising this knowledge helps us understand better the customer position.

In sales, empathy is the key. I always say:. This method helps understand the customer from the emotional side. This knowledge is also really useful in a conversation. Thanks to this knowledge we can understand the scale of the problem the customer is facing, what emotions it arouses, what influences his decisions and with what concerns he is struggling. Using the empathy map, we will be filling in individual fields with our answers to 6 simple questions.

Order a pizza, open the window to have an access to fresh air. Hang the empathy map on the wall in the form of a large sheet. Take the sticky notes and stick all your ideas in the relevant places. Then, analyse everything and write it down. What does the customer see? What offers of products does the customer receive on a daily basis? What happens within the industry? What solutions are currently popular? What his co-workers are doing?

What does the customer hear? What opinions have an influence on him? Whose opinions are these? What media channels does he listen to? What does the customer think and feel? What are his plans and where is he heading?

What emotions have an impact on his decisions? There may be a number of people influencing the decision, and you may need to spend as much time selling to them as you do the customer or the ultimate decision maker. There are two types of influencers:. The channels are pipes or mechanisms to get to your customers.

Some CEOs think that the distributor, wholesaler or retailer is the customer. Develop a marketing and sales strategy to target individuals who fit your ideal customer profile and slowly weed out the rest.

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