Why you should do customer research

Creating customer profile sheets allows you to creating something tangible to help you better understand and visualise your different types of customer.  Remember – there is now no such thing as a generic ‘vegan customer’ so we’re going to go really specific on creating some better definitions.  We want to know their age, where they live, what their job is, how much they earn, what their pastimes are, where they spend their time online, how they make decisions and why they buy your product.  We want to have some fun doing it and give them wacky names that we can remember.  We might even base them on people we know or pin a photo of what we think they look like to their sheet.

Let’s walk through an example.  Imagine you sell vegan cleaning products.  You might think that you can’t create a profile of a typical customer because everyone needs to clean, right?  You can sell to everyone!  This is a huge mistake, because if you try to sell to everyone then the most likely result is that no-one will buy.  Again, go back to the example of huge global conglomerate Unilever – they own Lynx, Sure, Impulse and Brut.  These are all brands that make the same thing and are seemingly in competition with each other, but each targets a very different type of customer and each outsell any generic ‘for everyone’ deodorant brand you might find.  If Unilever identify a new type of customer for deodorant that isn’t a good fit for their current brands, they will create (or buy) another one.

The more you try and make the product attractive to everyone, the more diluted your message will have to be.  So, we need to define which customers REALLY connect with your product so that we can understand them, better serve them and find more people like them.