Know Your Customer
It’s no secret that the customer is the basis of all marketing and business strategy. A corporation’s largest concern should be understanding the customer’s needs, wants, and demands because in the long run, a company that is genuinely interested in their customers will be interesting to investors. A successful business is built on having a profound perception of the entire consumer driven process highlighting what moves them from awareness, to interest, to eventual action. Having this understanding prefaces the strategic formulation of effective actionable insight. The end result can be a real competitive advantage in your industry.
Consumers can fall into many segments. For example, Gary A. Williams and Robert B. Miller state in their article entitled, “Change The Way You Persuade” that persuasion works best when it’s tailored to five distinct decision making styles. These styles include charismatics, thinkers, skeptics, controllers, and followers. Being able to tailor your messaging based on individual personalities can greatly improve your chances of creating an actionable and loyal customer base. Because each purchase decision is based off of many personal influences, it’s important to have a framework in place to identify what customer values and purchase styles are. One method to organizing this information is to create representative profiles of your customers based on real data. These hypothetical archetypes, or “personas” represent specific customer segments and include valuable information pertaining to their individual purchase behaviors, rationality, and emotions. Having these touch-points mapped out not only helps with marketing and business positioning strategies, but assists in creating alignment internally and externally when it comes to messaging, sales, and customer service. All internal and external parties will be making decisions from the same vantage point, using the same language. The end result can be an accelerated marketing foundation process that is highly effective in driving the consumer into your desired action.
Please click on the image below to see just how truly informative and effective a persona can be.
Kurt Kaufer
