BY LISA BRINK – DIRECTOR, CUSTOMER STRATEGY AND INSIGHTS
Remember this image from the post, “The Funnel to Nowhere” a few weeks ago by Brooke Niemiec, VP of Marketing Strategy?
Brooke’s point was that you can’t make a customer’s purchase path linear — they’re too complex. Similarly, you can’t just stick customers in a funnel, measure them, and call them loyal when they reach the end. You also wouldn’t send those loyal customers back to the top of the funnel again, as if you didn’t know who they were. Loyalty is earned through understanding what your customers need and want each time they engage with your brand.
That understanding comes through a spectrum of insights. Your customers are not one-dimensional—they sometimes make decisions rationally and other times emotionally and impulsively. Adding to the complexity, most people are in a constant state of acquiring information, processing it, synthesizing, and storing it for future recall, consciously or unconsciously. Their thoughts are being shaped and re-shaped continually. If your customers are in a constant state of change, shouldn’t we be too?
The greater your appetite is for those insights, and the wider your aperture is for capturing them, the more likely you’ll uncover a deeper understanding of your customers. And then what, you ask? You strike up more relevant conversations with them and deliver meaningful experiences based on who they are and what their needs are.
To be clear, the image of your customers is fuzzy at first. You use different lenses, or tools, to capture multiple points of data about your customer at any given time. A single source of insight will not buy you much in the way of a differentiating insight. You have to be dynamic in capturing information.
Dynamic information capture may start with one source, such as transactional data, but that’s just the beginning—the foundation of segmenting your customers based on what they are doing with your brand and when. You continue to build with attitudinal insights that tell you how they feel about the category and your brand, market studies that give you share of wallet, social insights that shed light on their interests, and lifestyle and ethnography that give you a sense for their values and beliefs.
Then something magical happens. A picture of your customers emerges as you weave those insights together and build out that collage. Looking at one data point can be powerful, but looking across many is illuminating.
Wouldn’t you want to look at your customers that way?
Widening the Aperture
BY LISA BRINK – DIRECTOR, CUSTOMER STRATEGY AND INSIGHTS
Remember this image from the post, “The Funnel to Nowhere” a few weeks ago by Brooke Niemiec, VP of Marketing Strategy?
Brooke’s point was that you can’t make a customer’s purchase path linear — they’re too complex. Similarly, you can’t just stick customers in a funnel, measure them, and call them loyal when they reach the end. You also wouldn’t send those loyal customers back to the top of the funnel again, as if you didn’t know who they were. Loyalty is earned through understanding what your customers need and want each time they engage with your brand.
That understanding comes through a spectrum of insights. Your customers are not one-dimensional—they sometimes make decisions rationally and other times emotionally and impulsively. Adding to the complexity, most people are in a constant state of acquiring information, processing it, synthesizing, and storing it for future recall, consciously or unconsciously. Their thoughts are being shaped and re-shaped continually. If your customers are in a constant state of change, shouldn’t we be too?
The greater your appetite is for those insights, and the wider your aperture is for capturing them, the more likely you’ll uncover a deeper understanding of your customers. And then what, you ask? You strike up more relevant conversations with them and deliver meaningful experiences based on who they are and what their needs are.
To be clear, the image of your customers is fuzzy at first. You use different lenses, or tools, to capture multiple points of data about your customer at any given time. A single source of insight will not buy you much in the way of a differentiating insight. You have to be dynamic in capturing information.
Dynamic information capture may start with one source, such as transactional data, but that’s just the beginning—the foundation of segmenting your customers based on what they are doing with your brand and when. You continue to build with attitudinal insights that tell you how they feel about the category and your brand, market studies that give you share of wallet, social insights that shed light on their interests, and lifestyle and ethnography that give you a sense for their values and beliefs.
Then something magical happens. A picture of your customers emerges as you weave those insights together and build out that collage. Looking at one data point can be powerful, but looking across many is illuminating.
Wouldn’t you want to look at your customers that way?
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