Customer Connections

Understanding the needs of your customer is the difference between businesses that thrive, and businesses that die out. When we look for innovations and attractive markets to enter it is tempting to simply follow the crowd. Chasing the “next big thing” is alluring but entering these markets without adequate customer insight has led many founders down a dangerous path. By investing heavily in their ideas without getting frequent feedback from the market they develop excellent products that fulfill the product vision but entirely fail connect with the consumers they hope to serve. We want to strive for customer intimacy, where we receive frequent feedback on their needs and continually iterate the product often. Here are a few tactics we have used to connect with customers in the past.

Customer Interviews

While this is a classic option, customer interviews are key for building customer intimacy. There is a variety of ways to speak with your customers, but we often find nothing beats a one on one conversation with your current customer. You will notice we recommend chatting with your current customer, not just your target customers. These in person conversations shed a lot of light on how to build the value of your customers and tailor your products to their, sometimes unexpected, wants.

An example here is where a local coffee shop was hoping to expand into baked goods but didn’t know what products would connect best. By speaking with those already frequenting their shop they were able to find that many of their customers placed a premium on gluten free options as opposed to the sweet treats they had expected their customers would want. This also helped them build out a following in the gluten free community which expanded their addressable market in a way they would not have expected if they simply interviewed the customers, they planned on serving.

Market Research

Another way to learn more about your customers is to conduct detailed market research. Just like you would do market research for launching a new product it is good to do understand the market of consumers you are looking to connect with. One avenue to do this is to understand who are the “influencers” in their life, such as do they care more about sports athletes or business leaders? We want to know who your customers listen to and what level of trust they place in their influencers.

Additionally, this entails looking at socioeconomic trends for your target customers. What are the things they care about and what is top of mind when they are making their purchasing decisions? Deep research of your customers will help you better communicate with them in the customer interviews and in marketing conversations.

Competitive Analysis

Analyzing how your competitors are viewing and communicating with their customers is important but not for the reason you would think. Many firms do this as a way to copy successful strategies, but this leads to a bunch of me-too products and advertisements that do not connect with the customers in a meaningful way. Seeing how others view your customers can give insight into what ways are competitors not viewing your customers. There are often facets of the customer that firms may overlook simply because nobody else is thinking of them that way. Uncovering customer value by addressing customer needs in a way that others are overlooking ties together the market research and customer interviews in the ultimate value creating trifecta of customer intimacy.

Knowing your customers is critical to long term business success. Leveraging multiple tactics to learn about your customers amplifies the value of each method used and leads to incredible insights. Your customers are excited to tell you about what they want and how your business can fill their needs both now and in the future. Customer centric business practices will continue to be a driver of growth and will give firms that deepen their customer understanding a competitive edge and ways to sustainably build a thriving business.