How Well Do You Know Your Customer? (Video)
Photo by MARK ADRIANE on Unsplash
Hey Founder,
Do you have a name for your best customer? You know who I mean: the one who buys everything you sell and can’t get enough of it? The one who writes glowing reviews online and backs it up with loyalty to your brand?
Wouldn’t you like to have a whole lot more of them? When it comes to understanding who your customer is, do you focus mostly on the who, where, what, and how much money they might be willing to spend? Those questions are important, but what about the why? Why does someone buy a product? They want to solve a problem, so why do they choose to solve it with one particular brand instead of others?
At one of my former companies these questions obsessed us so much that we invested in some major market research with Pure Branding, one of the leading outfits serving the natural products industry. Our work with Pure Branding helped us identify a primary customer avatar we dubbed Vibrant Vanessa. We had pictures of her and distilled our data down to a script of what she believed. For example:
“Nutrition and happiness are linked to health. Good in, good out!”
“I take what I need when I need it because staying healthy is really important to me.”
We looked at her shopping habits, her daily channel usage, how she thought about health, and how much she typically spent on health products. When we looked at Vanessa’s brand attributes — what she looks for in a brand — words or concepts relating to transparency and quality rated high, and the word “price” never came up. Wouldn’t you just love to know whether price mattered a lot, a little, or not at all to your customers?
Vanessa was a spiritual person who liked to laugh a lot, stay active, and follow her intuition. She based her choices less on fact gathering than how she felt about the brand, including whether or not it supported her own, strongly held ideals. As for usage, Vanessa was willing to do some research on new brands and experiment from time to time, but overall Vanessa treasured her routines.
It’s not hard to see how invaluable this research was in crafting our marketing to our target audience.
When you do the work of identifying your Vanessa, you lay the groundwork for discovering secondary customers. Ours included Alternative Ava, Laid-back Leah, and Conservative Constance. We were able to compare and contrast these personae and adjust our marketing accordingly. For example, Ava used supplements as often as Vanessa but wasn’t willing to pay as much. Leah didn’t use products as often as Vanessa and Ava, but she represented our future customer.
Ultimately, having this kind of fund of knowledge about your customers enables your team to focus your messaging in a way that sets up your brand for years of growth. But it begins with becoming a bit obsessed about your customers.
How well do you know your customer’s motivations? How can we at ScalePassion help you acquire this knowledge?
Sincerely,
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