Why Do We Need To Understand People Behind Customers

By Andriy Prudius

We all say we are customer oriented. However, how much do we know about our customers beyond the fact that they buy our product? What are the real reasons that drive them to actually choosing (or not choosing) what we offer to them? If we are honest to ourselves then probably the answer is that we do not know so much.

Many marketers know that their brands are more than their functional benefits like “our detergent washes better” or “our soft drink tastes sweeter” still they try to put upfront these benefits – usually in a form of a carefully delivered unique selling proposition (USP). The problem with USP is that same as your customers are not linear-thinkers making decisions based on one deliverable, your brands are not one or even a bundle of functional benefits.

Your product includes emotional benefits such as how it makes your customers feel when they use it, or how they are perceived by others when using it. The overall functional and emotional experience your customer has with your brand creates customer value and that value greatly depends on how your brand fits into customers’ lives – their values, attitudes, and lifestyle.

People mostly buy for emotional reasons and then look for rational reasons to explain their emotional decisions. More and more marketers, whether they are in consumer based businesses or even B2B, are recognizing that it’s people’s lives that are the fundamental driver of purchase decisions. Still when it goes about segmenting potential customers, companies often follow their old habit trying to understand them based on demographic factors.

The problem with demographic data is that it can only be useful in terms of figuring out what your customers want functionally, but it absolutely fails in explaining why they want it. Let me give you a real-life example. By this point in your life you have definitely made some friends. Probably, many of those are dependable people who have been with you through all the good and bad times since your school and university years. They are of the roughly same age and though there are definitely some similarities between these people, yet you know better than anybody else that there are also significant differences.

Those differences are the ones that count a lot when it goes about anything significant you want to deliver to your friend – whether it is some sort of news, a weekend idea, or a Birthday present. The positioning of anything that you want to “sell” to your friend will greatly depend on what you know about his personality but not what age he is or where she lives.

So why do we as marketers forget about this simple truth when trying to bombard our 21-45 year old customers (both male and female), living in cities 50 000 +, income average + with the messages which are not meaningful to them for the fact that they don’t connect your brand with their values and lifestyle?

I strongly believe we need to move on to a deeper understanding of our customers by recognizing them as people with their distinct lives, values and attitudes. Psychographic segmentation is definitely a good tool to get a grasp of who they are and why they are. That will also explain in a great deal of why they buy or don’t buy your product. And once you are there you will discover yourself in a completely new game of satisfying your customer needs and wants - a much more meaningful both to your customer and your business.