Knowing and understanding your target audience is the overarching rule of exceptional companies. Take Skullcandy, for example. Its known to be one of the biggest sellers of headphones across the globe and it took less than a decade for it to earn this highly coveted ranking. But when you take a closer look into what founder Rick Alden deems to be his secret ingredient, youll understand why.
A companys brand is everything, of course it is. According to Alden however, it’s most important to build a brand together with your audience. Hes been open about the fact that Skullcandy had difficulty selling its products to start off with as it didnt have an identifiable identity. However, as time went by and the brand was tweaked, skateboarders and snow boarders came to accept Skullcandy as a product that expressed who they were.
He could probably tell you what music they listened to, what style they were inclined to wear and the activities they enjoyed and it’s all because he built a loyal customer base with their personalities in mind.
Understanding your target audience to such a degree may be harder than expected though. After being confronted by a cocktail of uncertainty spanning higher interest rates, the Brexit vote, an increase in expectations and dropping barriers to entry resulting in a crowded and fragmented market, businesses have found it harder to make a lasting impact. But the shining light in the proverbial darkness is that you just need to learn where to look in order to gain some intriguing insight.
The answer, it seems, is to ignore the temptation to solely judge customers on what they buy. Starcounts power couple, Edwina Dunn and Clive Humby, believe that in an age of personalisation businesses should attempt understanding customers aspirations and motivations.
The two certainly know what theyre talking about, with the internet being rife with one particular tale about Tesco. It was said that in 1994 while still at co-founded company Dunnhumby they were invited to give a presentation to the chains directors, which concluded in the then chairman, Ian MacLaurin, saying: What scares me is that you know more about my customers after three months than I know after 30 years.
It led to the birth of the Tesco Clubcard, and it’s what Dunn categorised the defining moment that led them to sell Dunnhumby to Tesco for 93m and join consumer insight company Starcount taking the ability to build an incredibly accurate picture of consumers with them.
If you’re wondering how they managed to shock the Tesco board, it was by staying clear of the age-old method of using demographics to access a companys potential market a template both stressed needed to be torn down.
“With emerging interest graphs from social networks, behavioural data from search outlets and lifecycle forecasting, one could say there are much better ways of targeting customers,” Dunn, the CEO of Starcount, said. Businesses need to come to terms with the fact that the market is changing and build a deeper understanding of customers, or risk irrelevance.
Chief data scientist Humby, deemed the ideas man by Dunn, suggested customers as such can no longer be pigeon-holed based simply on age, gender or purchase history. The one size fits all method should be put to rest,” he said. Our variations in life stage, financial status and habits are too enormous for us to be grouped into demographics.
Read more for some insight on how to gain a loyal following.
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The key, he explained, was the often overlooked digital footprint left by customers on social media. Each customer leaves a clue about themselves whenever they interact online, and it is by following this yellow brick data-encrusted road that companies will be able to glean exactly what makes consumers tick.
Its a concept Starcount itself relies upon, having applied its own methodology to a mix of social data to produce a more detailed picture of consumers within the automotive, fashion, and beauty industries.
A persons background gives context to their behaviour and clues to their attitudes,” he explained. People also tend to, both directly and indirectly express, their life events on social media such as weddings, moving house or getting a new job. These are always great indications for high-spend opportunities and lets you know what part of the journey your customers are on. Even the people following you, or who you follow in turn, holds a nugget of information.
Youll also be better able to paint a picture of your target audience, Humby said, if you knew more about their interests and passions ie. what someone would buy as a treat for a job well done.
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Combining all these factors are key to creating a strategy that will endear you to your customers,” Dunn explained. While marketing has always been about forming relationships, marketing to the modern day consumer is all about the relationship itself. The brands that do well are the ones who talk to them at their level, show they care and make them feel they have their best interests in mind.
Frankly, many businesses are failing in this regard, which is your opportunity to swoop in and enchant those same customers into falling for your company. That being said, Dunn offered a few tips on how brands could better interact with customers particularly when it came to Twitter.
Essentially, dont act as a nameless brand genuinely talk with customers and speak to them as people not as you would in a press release. But most of all, she stressed, brands shouldnt feel the need to push available products. Instead, companies needed to join in on conversations that already exist.
Walt Disney said it best: Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends. Creating love between your company and your customers can help scale positive word of mouth thats absolutely priceless. However, he seems to have left out the part about bosses needing to come to better grips with who their audience really are and that it would do far more good to your brand than a fairy godmother ever could.
