Understanding your customer is your core business. Every failure in marketing is caused by lack of understanding the customer's needs hence misinterpreting them. To understand your customer you should talk and survey them. Hence you will get better idea about how to satisfy their needs.
Why many managers often forget to talk to their customers once they need to develop the marketing strategy. Some of the easons are :
* The pressure to gain short term target
* The manager believe that they already knew the customer's need
* They don't want to hear customers talk about negative side of their company's products and
service
* They are too confident to their products
* The belieft that customers are so dependant to their products
Prior you conduct the survey, try to find out the benefit of your product. The benefit itself represants the customer's problem, which is in your side the customer's problem could be turned to be your business opportunity to satisfy them. However your product's features represant the specification of your product or service. You should differentiate between these two in order to have better feeling of your customer's need.
Actually it is difficult task to identify your real customers. For B2B business especially, everyone who is getting involved in purchasing decision could be defined as decision making unit. The decision making unit could be categorized into :
1. Users
2. Initiators
3. Influencers
4. Gate keepers
5. Deciders
6. Stoppers
Try to identify these decision making unit, so that you can suits your marketing strategy for each.
Other way to understand your customer is the market research. Market research could be ranged from simple one up to multiple complex research which spend so much company's money. However you can also conduct the simple one by asking the questions to your customers regarding their need, the competitor might do to your customer, environmental trend etc. You can arrange the questions for survey and having the feed back for analysis.
You should recognize also the weakness and strong points of the data gathered by you or the marketing research company as it will impact the data analysis.
Marketing survey could be focused to all of players and movers who will influence the marketing performance of the organizations. They could be end users, reseller, competitors, suppliers and trend. However most of marketing survey usually is focused to the customers, their needs, habita and behaviours.
The study of end users included :
* Segment : The characteristics which can be used to identify and differentiate the
customer
* Purchasing behaviour : how they learn about our product and service and mhy they choose
them
* Need : the benefit offered to customers and priority
* Perceived value : maximal value to be paid and why
* Product : evaluate the competitor's products and services available in market
* Brand : accesories which is associated to our brand
* Copy of advertising : advertising comparison
* Media : the media where our customers obtain the information
* Selling presentation : content of presentation
* Pricing : how customers react to price changing
* Buying behaviour
Kind of data for marketing survey is divided into :
1. Primary data : the data which is collected by marketing person and its colleagues inside
the company. The survey is designed by them.Therefore the company
aware about the weaknesses of the data and its limitations.
2. Secondary data : the data which is gained by marketing research company or other third
party
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