Who is your customer?
From Seth’s blog:
The question: Who is your customer?
It’s not obvious.
Zappos is a classic customer service company, and their customer is the person who buys the shoes.
Nike, on the other hand, doesn’t care very much at all about the people who buy the shoes, or even the retailers. They care about the athletes (often famous) that wear the shoes, sometimes for money. They name buildings after these athletes, court them, erect statues…
As more and more companies embrace digital as an integrated part of their core activities (and thus their brand identity), the question of Who is our customer? is becoming increasingly crucial for any brand to ask itself. Not just in wide strokes, but down to the details.
Just as digital signifies a significant shift in corporate identity, it may also, and often does, signify an equally if not more significant shift in customer segments. Going digital, you might suddenly be reaching, and falling into the consideration sets of, entirely new audiences. And with those new audiences come new customer behaviors to understand and react to.
One example that comes to mind to illustrate this is that of beauty brands, who’ve traditionally employed push strategies in getting their products directly to the customer by dictating which looks are currently in vogue. The arrival of the Internet and the subsequential rise of self-made beauty experts and consumer-driven beauty trends are ending that. Today’s beauty consumer has access to an unlimited supply of guidance, advice, support and inspiration online; she’s no longer restricted to the beauty parlor, the department store beauty counter or the fashion magazines. And if she likes, she’s got an array of platforms under her fingertips on which to make herself a trendsetter.
To remain competitive in this new reality, beauty brands do not only need to figure out how to respond to their customers’ online activities (ignoring your brand fans is a fundamentally bad idea), but also how to be locally relevant across the markets they’ve entered – because going online means going global, and each regional pocket of the Internet has its own quirks and twists. What works in the US may not work in China, and what you see in China may be (yet) unheard on in the US.
Do you know where your customers spend their time online? Do you understand the needs and interests that bring them together? If not, you better do your homework before the competition swoops in and makes your customers theirs.