You can't speak for your customer, so stop trying
You can never truly speak for your customer and thinking you can is actually making it harder for you to run your business.
Why should you care?
Serving your customer’s needs should be at the heart of everything your business does.
As soon as you start to try and speak for the customer and what they need with anything other than data - there’s a very high possibility you’re actually serving your needs or those of someone else in your business rather than your customers’.
This means you risk wasting money, missing the mark with campaigns, losing customers because you’re not serving their needs. Or just wasting time more generally on things customers don’t want.
Nothing personal, but this is very personal.
Let me make this clear, you not being able to speak for your customer is definitely not because you don't want to speak for them or because you don't know what you're talking about. In fact, it’s actually the opposite. Because your product or service is yours (or one you have a vested interest in) you have a completely different lens and set of biases that cloud and skew every ‘view of the customer’ you could hold.
That means you’ll:
Likely over-index how important what you do is to everyone else.
Know the ins and outs of it far better than everyone else.
Have an additional dimension of ‘behind the scenes’ knowledge your customers won’t.
The easiest way to think about this is a parent and their child. Because the parent is (hopefully) so loving and invested in their child they’re literally the last person you can look to for an unbiased opinion about their child. You see this all the time with new parents. It’s like their child is the first child ever to exist in the world, ever. And that’s because to them, that child is everything. Look, you’re probably not as obsessed with your product/service/brand as a parent is with a newborn child, but I hope you see my point.
What gets in the way?
I’m going to jump ahead a bit here and tell you that the answer to the question of “how do I get my customers point of view” is by conducting research. But even though you now know that, there are still many barriers to actually performing this research:
You simply don't know how to conduct research. That's OK, we can help you with that. Read this article then come and talk to us with any questions.
You don't have the money to put towards conducting research. Research comes in many formats and, yes, some can be expensive. But a lot of it only costs you time, maybe a beer or coffee. In another article, I'll cover an extremely cheap and effective way you can conduct research with your existing customers.
You don't have time to conduct research. Spending time conducting research will mean you save time in the long run because it makes you more effective at meeting your customer's needs because you actually know what they are. You’ll also often uncover things you hadn’t considered because, as the old saying goes, you don’t know what you don’t know.
Your ego is too big to risk finding out you're wrong. Didn’t see that one coming, did you? Before you get defensive, hear me out…
This one is really reallllllllly important, especially if you’re an old-salt who’s run their business or been in their industry for years. By the way, if you read that line above and at any stage were triggered and said ‘what the fuck do you know, marketing guy?’ you’re probably who I’m talking to. Please keep reading or call me to tell me I’m wrong.
The truth is, the more experienced we get, the worse we get at listening to those around us. Think of how many industries you know of which were turned on their head because bigger companies got complacent, stopped listening to what their customers wanted and went under. Been to a Blockbuster recently? How’s your Nokia phone coming along?
And that extends to our customers when we think they know what they want without actually asking them. I’m trying to tell you the assumptions you've built over the years from your experience can be challenged, and in some cases proved incorrect with data. That's a very hard pill for some people to swallow. But it’s one you need to be brave and humble enough to because if you don’t, your competitors will.
Don’t tell me, show me.
Let me give you an example: We ran a campaign for a customer who was adamant their market only cared about price. Why did he think that? Well, because that's the way it'd always been for the last 10+ years. So we always had to include a price promotion in all our advertising for them.
Dropping your price is the easiest lever to pull to make sales, but it’s also the quickest way to chew into your profits both short and long term as customers perceive less value in the product.
Lucky for us the customer agreed to test two pieces of creative. One which featured a price message and one that featured a generic product message. In multiple tests, the generic message far outperformed the pricing message when it came to clicks, conversions and ultimately revenue… I’m not saying price doesn’t matter, what I’m showing you is this customer had held that ‘knowledge’ for almost a decade without being challenged and we were able to disprove it in a test with data rather than our opinions.
My customers don’t know what they want
Some of you will be reading this and call bullshit on the entire article because of examples you can think of where ‘visionary’ or ‘groundbreaking’ businesses that have bought out products that the market didn’t even know it wanted (it’s OK, I know you’re thinking of Apple).
You’re indeed correct: those organisations do exist.
But do you think they came up with those ideas by themselves without speaking to their customers to get the direction and validate their customer’s needs? Of course not, they’re pioneers because they’re humble and clever enough to ask their customers for help, and when they get the insights they need from their research - they turn it into something awesome. A great phrase to remember which underpins it is don’t find customers for your product - find products for your customer.
Don’t be a Karen
Like any problem, the first step on the road to recovery is admitting you have one.
That requires a stack of humility because we’re the masters of our business and to even consider we don’t know what we’re talking about requires a huge step change. That humility needs to extend to the problem we’re trying to solve. The best way to do that is by treating your knowledge of your customer as a blank canvas to fill.
If you use your product or service as a customer you’ll definitely have feelings or ideas about how to make it better. But you should be substantiating or at the very least confirming that the things you think are good for your product are things that your customers want too.
If you think you can speak for your customer without research and data, you’re probably being a Karen. And that’s OK too, so long as you own it. Because as I pointed out literally 3 paragraphs ago, the first step to solving any problem is by admitting you have one.
The next step in solving a problem is thinking about a solution, and in this case, that solution starts with customer research.
If you got through all that, don’t think I’m completely full of shit and are looking for a decent marketing partner - Give us a shout and let us take your six.