People talk about marketing but not discussing enough about creating customer value. What is customer value? To start we need to evaluate the value that flows between the value chain players and discover which customer-value segments exist, based on their value needs, expectations and aspirations and how we want to serve those segments.
This goes beyond conventional quantitative surveys or focus groups. It requires laser sharp attentiveness to customer requirements and needs (both articulated and unarticulated), as well as lots of creativity and imagination.
Three major components in the discovery process: 1/ the market 2/ customer behavior and three what jobs they are trying to accomplish. 3/ Then we can start the process of market mapping. The goal is to identify clusters of customers with similar needs and change our view of target buyers from a random aggregation to a linear plot, from those most likely to respond to your customer-value propositions, and eliminate those who will never respond. Relentless fine tune your USPs until we get it right.
The exercise includes high-level map describing all the needs, value expectations, loyalty behavior as well as the category level of involvement. With this info, we can work down to the next deeper levels of detail. The map is a just a starting point — you may also need to know what substitutions customer use or why their behavior switch overtime, and what unmet or poorly or painfully met needs they have. Questions like these can help you discover and define customer segments. At Idea Couture we have a great tool kit to do this. There is science and there is art. That's why we have a Resident Anthropologist in house.
Customers are not just the people who happen to want to spend money and buy your products; they are any member of the customer value chain who directly, or indirectly, purchases or influences the purchases of your products and services. Every customer today is part of your value chain as they are part of the customer communities that shapes other decisions. Successful marketers effectively converse with their community through blogs, social networks and countless other forms of media. Customers are the message, the medium AND your marketing platform.
Food for thought: We also need to rethink traditional corporate functions and culture. You cannot have an effective community strategy if you’re working with an inflexible corporate structure or lots of organization silos. To benefit from leveraging the power of community, companies must have a change plan otherwise you can be stuck forever unless you know how to carefully cultivate internal chaos.
