Know Your Customers Well

For businesses, it is important for you to profile your customers properly as this helps you with the adjustments in the volume of inventory, attack in marketing strategies, and the whole product positioning in your line of competition.

Customer profiling is a way for you to understand your actual market. No matter how good you plan and define your target market, there is still a chance that your actual market is different than your target market. Even though you have collected a considerable amount of survey data, you have to conduct a study during your actual operations.

For salespeople, customer profiling is just as important to them as it is with firms. This is because profiling helps them understand how to attack the customer in their sales pitch.

Here are some of the things you have to look into with your customer profiling:

Gender. What is the percentage of male versus female that avails your product or service? Maybe the store looks too girly to attract men. Maybe the packaging is. Understand which gender mostly buys your product and figure out why.

Marital Status. For married women, are they buying for themselves or for their husband, or for their pre-adolescent kid? The most common example for this is in underwear. I have seen a lot of moms buy underwear not for their husband, but for their kids. They are not the intended buyer. But certainly, it reaches their target consumer, so this means they don’t necessarily have to make the shelf manlier. They just have to keep it that way since everyone in the family seems to buy it.

For car salesmen, should they boast on how fast a car can get within a few seconds to a married man? Or should they focus on the safety features? Obviously, a man with a family will be looking for a family-friendly vehicle, and not a drag race-ready machine. This means that the car salesman should either show the customer bulky and spacious cars, or promote the safety features of the model he wants to sell.

Motivation. What motivates them to buy? Is it the need or is it the design? Let’s illustrate how motivation works. Take a look at smartphones. There are a lot of smartphones available in the market and most of these devices have almost the same specs as each other. But why does a certain brand outsell the others? Maybe it’s because of the brand name. Or maybe it’s the design. Or price? Phones now belong to needs, but that does not guarantee that every phone will sell. Consumers’ motivation must be studied and properly applied in the marketing strategy. In a com-munity of middle-class consumers, high-end phones will not sell well. In a community of rich people, money is no object, but the design and reliability would be.

Capacity. How high is your customers’ ability to pay? Is money still a consideration when they buy? Does it matter for them when you have four-digit prices? By knowing or at least getting an estimate of the average income of your actual market, you are able to set the price at a reasonable and affordable amount.

Profession. The need to understand the profession common to consumers varies from industry to another. But to make sure, you might want to check out your consumers and you might find something interesting. Are they self-employed? Employees? BPOs? Let’s take a look at coffee shops in the middle of call centers. Did you see their operating time? They open earlier and close later. Some of them don’t even close at all. That’s because they understand that their market has what we call a graveyard shift—this means that even in the dead of night, there will be clients coming in to their store.

Here’s another example: Have you heard of the brand of shoes that has a metal component inside it? Who in their right mind will want to buy heavy shoes? If you know for yourself that you won’t buy it, it’s because you’re not its market. This is originally intended for engineers who go in construction sites daily, facing the risk of crushing their feet under falling concrete. This line of shoes stays strong with its market because it knows who its actual market is.

With the cost of marketing rising astronomically, it is crucial to make each peso count. Knowing better the actual profile of your customers would make your marketing campaigns far more effective.

*Originally published by the Manila Bulletin. C-4, Sunday, July 26, 2015. Written by Ruben Anlacan, Jr. (President, BusinessCoach, Inc.) All rights reserved. May not be reproduced or copied without express written permission of the copyright holders.