Do You Really Know Your Customers?

It’s easy to trick yourself into thinking you know your customer.

When in reality, you may be serving a biased version of your actual customer.

This week’s newsletter focuses on ways to make sure you’re serving the customer you really have.

This Week:

• Marketing: 5 Ways To Make Your Consumer Insights More Effective

• Branding: Why Ideal Customer Profiles Are Dangerous​

• Advertising: Who Reads Your Ad?

Marketing: Do You Make One Of These 5 Consumer Insights Mistakes?

After 19 years of working with clients on branding and marketing strategies, I’ve noticed some common pitfalls in how companies collect consumer insights.

Here are five ways to avoid some of the most common ones.

1. Have A Framework

Before conducting any research, you should have a framework for organizing and understanding how your customers see your business and industry.

And you should only collect data that helps you build out that framework.

Building an effective framework starts with understanding what it is and what it isn’t:

It Isn’t a predetermined view of the customers that you try to prove.

It Is a way of creating parameters that shape how you collect and understand the data.

It Is a lens through which you interpret the data you collect.

2. Collect Data With A Purpose

Collecting data without a purpose is the #1 mistake I see companies make.

It’s what plagues much of Big Data. Companies collect data with the unspoken assumption that just by collecting it, an answer will appear.

The most obvious place this creeps in is in tracking studies — tracking year-over-year changes in metrics. Companies track metrics. They look at them. And they acknowledge them. But they don’t do anything with them to change their strategies.

If I could drive one point home, it would be this: every question you ask should tie to a potential action.

If it doesn’t tie to a potential action, you won’t do anything with it. You’ll waste money. And you’ll lose clarity because you have more data to sort through to decide.

Research is only as good as the questions you ask.

If you don’t ask the right questions ahead of time, you waste\ time and money.

3. Make Sure Your Focus Groups Are Focused

This mostly comes down to a recruitment issue.

Too often, I see a person in a focus group that doesn’t fit the mindset or demographics the group is supposed to represent. This is always a problem. However, it becomes a bigger problem when the outlier has the most dominant personality in the group.

You can avoid this by communicating clearly between your company and the recruiting facility and screening potential interviewees multiple times.

4. Embrace The Power of One-On-One

I like digging into marketing journals to find innovative ideas other companies aren’t using and to gain historical perspectives on marketing.

One of my favorite marketing articles was published early in 1952 in the Harvard Business Review: “Qualitative Market Research” by Allan R. Wilson. It is the first article the Harvard Business Review published on qualitative research.

In it, Wilson explores the potential for the new field of qualitative research.

He hints at a critical idea lost in much of the qualitative research that has followed the article. It could be rephrased as: if you want to learn about someone, would you interview their three best friends or a hundred people who met them just once or twice?

Find the customers who know your brand the best. Interview them one-on-one.

You’ll be surprised at the clarity and value of their insights.

They often know more about your brand than you do.

5. Sell In Ahead of Time

Research is only useful if people buy into it.

I’ve seen companies produce excellent research only to see it wasted because some people don’t view it as essential or immediately relevant.

Before conducting any research, consider what departments the research could affect. Get their input. And find out what is important to them.

Having people invested before you conduct the research makes it easier for them to buy in and take action when you deliver the research findings.

Branding: Why Ideal Customer Profiles Are Dangerous

Your Ideal Customer Profile is likely leading you astray.

I’ve seen it happen:

A company creates an Ideal Customer Profile.

They apply it to their marketing.

They get good results.

But they don’t get great results.

The problem?

Their Ideal Customer isn’t their Real Customer. It’s their interpretation of the customer. It sprinkles too much of their opinion on the customer. There are some aspects of the customer there. But it’s missing critical elements.

It replaces the mundane with the sexy.

And it becomes who they want the customer to be instead of who the customer is.

Common symptoms of Ideal Customer Profile use include:

Wanting the Ideal Customer more than the Real Customer.

Bad segmentation and targeting.

Ignoring or disbelieving data.

Adequate marketing.

Some results. Not great ones.

I even had a well-known company force me to re-run a survey because, “There’s no way that’s what our customers believe.” The results were the same the second time.

Ideal Customer Profiles may get you part of the way there. They’re adequate because they contain some truth.

But they don’t contain all the truth.

They’re a bit like a frayed shoe: They might help you run around the block. But they won’t help you go the distance.

Don’t trick yourself with your Ideal Customer Profile.

Ideal Customers don’t exist.

Figure out your Real Customer. And go the distance.

Advertising: Who Reads Your Ads?

People don’t read your ad.

Person does.

Thousands of people may read your ad. But they read it one by one.

It has to speak to that person specifically. Even though you wrote it for many.

Write for one.

To get many.