WHO ARE YOUR CUSTOMERS?
The more a business knows about its customers, the quicker its sales grow. A clear customer profile leads to greatly improved market targeting and much more cost-efficient campaigns. There is a multitude of firms that specialize in customer profiling, but the methods employed differ greatly.
Our approach to customer profiling is to identify the characteristics of what can be called a core customer. This is a person that chooses to do business with you and influences others to do the same. A core customer is very similar to a celebrity advertising Nespresso, except it is in reverse. Nestlé utilizes George Clooney to capture a specific market segment; a core customer does the same without the company being aware of it.
The more we know about the core customer, the more efficient our marketing campaigns become. To obtain specific information about brand sales, demographics, market segmentation, research and analysis that relates to your operation, we interact regularly with data generators such as Nielsen, Arbitron, Euromonitor, Kantar and Gallup. Then we have firms such as Decooda, LumiMobile, Dexterity, iPinion and PureProfile that are pioneering new types of consumer profiling and behavioral technologies via smartphones. These provide insight into what promotional methods may soon become available that can increase market penetration.
The right combination of internal and external information - tangible and intangible - is how the core customer identity is extracted.
CUSTOMER PANELS
Customer panels - also known as Customer Advisory Boards (CAB) or Customer Advisory Councils (CAC) - is a very effective method to extract valuable information about how the business is performing and how it is perceived.
Customer panels provide insight into industry trends and are helpful to sharpen business priorities and strategic direction. They usually consist of 10 - 15 customers selected to represent a cross section of the customer base.
Customer panels are traditionally made up of senior executives from customer companies instead of product users and tend to be more strategic than tactical. We have found a blend of both to be more effective in sharpening the company's overall market image, which in turn is affected by the company's performance.
These panels are not to be confused with focus groups, which a group of people are asked about their perceptions, opinions, beliefs and attitudes towards a specific product, service, concept, advertisement, idea, or packaging. That is more in the realm of advertising and we are on the strategic end. Customer panels are set up and run parallel to market targeting activities.
