Finding The Right Customer

Foundation For Growth

Whether a start-up or well established company, the foundation for strong sales and profits is a solid relationship with the “right customers.”  Often, companies scramble for customers and not often enough, the right customers.  The notion of who are – or should be – customers is often based on a faulty understanding of customer behavior, particularly “why” they are or should be  customers.  When planning, marketers make assumptions about customers and their value.  These assumptions too often prove wrong.

Planning for Customers

Business success ultimately depends on establishing mutually beneficial relationships with customers.  In very real terms, this relationship is the most important  competitive advantage over any and all competition.  And, it is often the most sustainable – with just a little care.  Customers are fiercely loyal when they receive emotional benefits (beyond the functional ones of the product or service itself) from the brand.

It is fascinating to watch companies focus on obtaining customers but pay little regard to what to do with them after they acquire them.  Or, how they plan on keeping them. 

In the typical planning process it seems that standard operating procedure focuses solely on gaining new customers.  Almost as an afterthought, focus shifts to keeping and then maximizing the value of those customers.  This is backwards:  planning should focus, first, on what to do with customers after they are obtained, and then focus on how to get those customers.  The value in this approach to planning is that it forces marketers to visualize customers and their contribution to success.  This “backward thinking” deters companies from going after the wrong customers – or spending more to acquire customers than they are worth over a reasonable relationship period.


Insight

What do marketers know about their marketplace or their customers?  The range of knowledge – or ignorance, depending on your point of view – is staggering.  To create a knowledge bank some marketers spent aggressively on marketing research.  Others, seem to manufacture their knowledge bank out of their own observations, beliefs and biases.

The marketers that spend on research often do so at very superficial levels.  They collect facts but gain very little insight into the marketplace.  Webster defines insight as the act of  apprehending the inner nature of things or of seeing intuitively.  It is insight that produces effective go-to-market strategies and eventual success. 

Learning about the marketplace is so critical that the first strategy addressed in the planning process should be about gaining insight, providing direction to answer these important questions: 

•  how do we build an inquiring culture, placing an economic value on information?
• how do we determine what information is important?
• how do we obtain it?
• how do we incorporate what we learn into what we do?
• how do we measure the performance of what we do?

Gaining insight is the hallmark of Brand Equity Advisors.  Whether routine planning, finding solutions to problems or seizing opportunities, the search for insight starts every effort.  Gaining insight is not just a matter of doing a research project or two.  Insight is about a process of continuous learning – feedback from the marketplace – that produces the right starting point and staying on the right track no matter what happens in the market (or the economy).