5 Powerful Ways to Get Closer to Your Customer
Great business plans start by knowing your target audience. This enables a company to clearly identify what their end user wants and needs, and then create products and services that meet those needs.
Most brands have a wealth of data about their customers— from usage behaviors to attitudinal profiles of users and non-users. Most can readily provide all sorts of useful information about anything related to their category. This type of knowledge can understandably create a high level of confidence in your team’s grasp of its target.
But many still struggle with how to truly differentiate themselves from the competition. This is where getting closer to your customer, truly empathizing with them, will make a difference in achieving your business goals. By putting a human perspective on the data, you can connect with customers in more personal ways and develop a more engaged relationship with them.
Here are 5 approaches to build that deep empathy and passion for your brand that ignites action and grows the business:
A master facilitator guides your insights team through face-to-face interactions with customers to create richer conversations with your target audience. This builds an internal understanding of customers that informs the right action for your brand.
These allow team members to holistically immerse in a customer’s life and gain a deep perspective of behaviors and emotions through discussion and observation. Interviews can be done by the team alone or paired with a moderator to guide the discussion.
These enable your insights team to meet several people in your target audience where they hang-out and feel most at ease: a coffee shop, pizza parlor, or a bar. Environments are chosen to enhance the depth of the research topic.
These provide a 360° view of how the customer lives: Shop where they shop, hang out where they hang out, visit the service providers they frequent. Immerse yourself in the activities with your target audience including meeting them for lunch, at their home, or other places they go in their daily life.
This is an excellent way to test pre-market products and packaging in grocery stores and other retail environments. See your customer interacting with actual shelves while a moderator asks about the subject’s shopping choices.
As an example of the power of these techniques, a leading CPG company used our Learning Connects™ approach to get a deeper understanding of their consumers to make more strategic product and marketing decisions. The sessions provided powerful insights that resulted in a surge of internal creativity. This led to many changes for the brand to become more compelling to consumers—ranging from new color schemes on the pack, expanded pack sizes, revamped usage instructions, and new programs tailored to different target audiences; all steps that led to stronger brand relationships.
Want to learn more about using more powerful techniques to connect your brand more deeply with its audiences? Contact us.
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