Can
you really know your customer?
I spend several hours each week at a stable and I'm continually amazed at the differences in personality among those horses. We might mentally lump them together in a category labeled "horses," but you can't treat-or ride-one like another. They all have their own idiosyncrasies, quirks and charms. And not knowing their personalities and preferences puts you at a disadvantage, whether you're feeding them or jumping them. The more time I spend with them, the better I get to know them, the more acute these differences become.
One horse I didn't like because she had stall and grooming issues: A former racehorse, Vilma pinned her ears back if you went in her stall and she hated being groomed. But when not in her stall, she was as pleasant as can be and loved being pet and scratched. Rumor has it she was great under saddle too. And despite her abhorrence of being groomed, she was an angel when being hosed down and wiped with the sweat scraper. But I wouldn't know any of those things without having direct contact with her.
Customers
are all different too
How often do we lump customers together into
just one generic category labeled "customers"? How often do we make
assumptions about customers because of their behavior in one situation,
not realizing it might be different if the situation were changed? If a
dozen horses can be so varied, how much diversity exits in the hundreds,
thousands or millions of people you market to?
There is no way to go out into the world and meet every possible customer and get to know their quirks so you know how to market to them. Nor can you know how they react in different situations, like Vilma in her stall vs. Vilma out of her stall. Granted there is a lot of technology out there that tracks behavior online and dynamically generates pages assumed to be more relevant to a returning site visitor. Emails can be personalized based on known factors about a customer. And variable printing means direct mail can be personalized too.
But perhaps the most important thing is to always remember that it's not a database of 5,000 potential or existing customers. It's a database of 5,000 people who all have a different history, worldview, political standing, religious belief, height, weight, hair color, favorite food and fashions they hate. And they can be in a good mood or a foul one, prefer email or snail mail, like to be talked up or want to be ignored. The thing is, you just don't know.
And without knowing you generalize, and when you generalize, you get generic, and when you get generic you start talking at people and not to them.
What
would you say to your ideal customer?
That's why I think picturing
the ideal customer is so helpful. We often ask clients "If your ideal
customer were to walk through the door right now, who would that be? Can
you describe them?" We try and move them away from 18 to 35 years old,
female, etc. and toward more personal specifics like they are
adventuresome cooks (and age doesn't matter in that demographic!). We
can't ever fit every customer into one catch-all description, but at least
we can be more targeted by having this ideal customer "type" to write
to.
Overall
though, I think the real lesson is to admit we don't know everything we
need to know about our customers and prospects. And instead of making
assumptions and getting generic, we need to find some way to find
out.
Until next month,
Sharon
