Customer-centricity and the value of better understanding customer needs
Photo-by-Melanie-Pongratz-on-Unsplash
True or false: marketers need to create products and services that consumers will value.
Trick question – of course, it’s true!
I feel like I shouldn’t need to start with it, but so we’re all on the same page: marketers need to create products that consumers will value. It is only in creating something that they value, that consumers will buy it.
You can have the best idea in the world, the best tech or ingredients to create it but if your target consumers don’t see the value in it, then it’s all completely pointless.
I have spoken with numerous entrepreneurs who had brilliant tech and brilliant ideas but they just couldn’t get traction for it. Whether it was because it was ahead of its time and consumers weren’t ready for it or because the final outcome didn’t give their target customers what they needed, ultimately they had to rethink:
Keep flogging the horse?
Or adapt the idea to suit the consumers?
Guess which businesses succeeded…
Build a business by being customer-centric
You and your stakeholders have a choice:
Create something and continue tweaking it until it finally fits with consumers and meets a need they have
Listen to your consumers and build something in response to a need or desire they have
Even if you’re not at NPD stage, the question every marketer should be asking themselves, regularly, but especially when sales aren’t as good as they should be, is:
How does your product or service help your customers?
It’s only in evaluating this question that you can be truly customer-centric. If you’re trying to force fit your product or service, then it’s always going to feel difficult. You’re going to need to keep re-evaluating what’s important to your customers so that you can shift your offering or risk becoming obsolete. You won’t just need to be dynamic and agile, you’ll constantly need to be creative to make those changes. Not to mention, when you’re trying to fit in with what’s happening, rather than having something that genuinely taps into a need, you’re so much more exposed to copy-cat competitors and competitors who do come along with something that consumers actually want.
For the organisations who are truly customer-centric, who are guided by their customers and what they need and want, things just keep getting better and better. (Ever noticed how often a really successful company has the simplest idea that you feel like you could have executed or come up with – that’s the sort of ease I’m talking about.)
How to strengthen your understanding of your customer
So, how do you know if you’re helping your consumers?
To answer this, I think you need to answer 4 questions:
What motivates your consumers?
What makes their purchase decision difficult?
What’s the hardest thing they face in your category or reading specifically to your offering? (also known as struggles or painpoints but in language that consumers actually speak)
All with the end goal of answering this: how can your proposition enhance their lives?
Human needs are slow to change
For what it’s worth, the answers to those 4 questions don’t change dramatically over time; there might be small trends that influence things one way or another, but generally speaking once you’ve achieved this depth of understanding, you only need to dip in from time to time to check if trends are moving the needle and how consumer behaviour is responding to it.
Human needs and desires don’t change massively over time.
For example, a human need that motivates many sectors is the desire to improve ourselves. If we look specifically at the health and wellness sector, nowadays, this human need may manifest as a desire to make better lifestyle choices, as opposed to a desire to lose weight no matter what.
The human need hasn’t changed, i.e. what is motivating behaviour, but the needle has shifted on customer needs: nowadays people don’t want yo-yo dieting, they want balance, to do things that are better for their bodies in the long term, to be strong (rather than thin)…
And this is how you create propositions and marketing that drive the results your business is striving for: strengthen your understanding of the customer.
