This the third in our series of marketing articles, if you missed the first and second ones you can find them here: Marketing Series: An Introduction to Marketing and Marketing Series: Customer Orientated Marketing.
Part 3. So how do I know what the customer wants?
That’s the million dollar question. If you even get this half right then you can be well on the way to running a successful business. The simplest, yet hardest things to do, is to see your products through the eyes of your consumers. This means stepping out of our busy working environment and looking objectively at the situation, from the outside in.
In these circumstances it’s sometimes difficult to know even what questions to ask. The following is a list of areas that need to be addressed so we recognise the types of end users and what would motivate them to purchase from you?
From our 7 O’s exercise in the previous article Marketing Series: Customer Orientated Marketing: we can determine what our potential customers are like. This information can then be organised under the following headings:
- Demographic: Department stores such as Harrods would target wealthy individuals, where LIDL would attract people of more modest means. For business 2 business it would be by sector (i.e. IT, manufacturing, retail)
- How to Access: What magazines do they read, favourite websites, events they would attend?
- Their motivations: Are they more interested in quality over price? Are they likely to follow fashion or be one step ahead? Do they make decisions from an ethical basis?
- Motivation to induce purchase: Security of long term support or length of warranty. Is it a necessity or a discretionary spend? Would they respond to special offers or discounts? (An English client of mine, who had a business in America, found that customers would travel further afield to get a cheaper deal on his offer, even though it would cost them more in petrol. For his demographic it was more important to say “I got a good deal” even if it did not make any financial sense.)
- Why they continue to buy: Expectation of customer care, product updates, association with a brand?
This segment of potential customers will define our market.
With this information we can then look at the variable inputs that go into the decision making process. The marketing mix is the balance that needs to be maintained to affect your customers buying behaviour.
Marketing Mix variables are as follows:
- Product: Are the products/services relevant and desirable to your demographic?
- Price: What are they prepared to pay, Affordability against desirability. (Many people, who couldn’t necessarily afford an iPhone, would save up to purchase one as a special treat. Affordability does not necessarily mean that a particular item is beyond their reach)
- Promotion: Advertising techniques and methods. TV campaigns, social networking etc. (The most original I’ve heard is advertising agents paying buskers on the London underground to play Johnny Cash songs in the weeks leading up to the film premiere of “Walk the Line”)
- Place: Where will they expect to get the product? Is it available in high street stores or an out of town shopping complex? Will they accept postal delivery or can it downloaded?
All of these four elements need to work in tandem to produce the sale. It is no good having a product available but your demographic can’t afford it, or run a marketing campaign but not have items available for the customer to easily access. If any one of these variables is not precisely in a form that is acceptable to the customer, they will simply go elsewhere.
In going through this list you begin to form some assumptions about who your target audience is, what they want and whether this would be a profitable exercise. Next in the series we shall look at how we test these ideas against the reality of “the cold hard light of day”.
