Analyzing your customers

Marketing is about acquiring and retaining customers. So you absolutely have to have a thorough understanding of who they are, where they are, what they believe about your products and services, and how they go about purchasing them. You also need to understand what’s going on in their minds in terms of what’s important to them and what perceptions they have about your products and services versus your competition. Hey, customers buy things for a variety of reasons, but some are more important than others. If you know what’s most important to them, you can appeal to that need or you can try to raise the sense of importance on another factor. You also need to measure how they rate your product versus others and how it delivers each benefit. You want to emphasize a key feature of your product that is better than the competition. So for our wallet example, let’s imagine we ask customers to rate the importance of each buying factor on a scale of one to 10, where 10 is the highest. We also ask them to rate the perception that each brand of wallet delivers on that buying factor, also on a scale of one to 10. So as you see here, slimness is rated as most important. And customers perceive our brand as slimmer than others. Hey, that’s good news. The factor “slimness” becomes the most important benefit we want to use in our marketing campaign. Great marketers understand their customers better than they understand themselves. A solid customer analysis prepares you to develop solid marketing strategy.