Brand-Building Series: Do you know who you’re talking to?

In the frenzied rush to meet all the demands of their ever-more-complex role, marketers often push the critical imperative of understanding the consumer to the back burner. We know who we’re talking to, goes the common excuse. But do we, really?   

Consumers today bear little resemblance to their cousins of a decade ago: They’re more empowered. They have many more information choices at their fingertips—and the technology to enforce them. They multi-task effortlessly and are adept at presenting different faces to the world, depending on who they’re interacting with.

That’s why it is critical, when you’re reviewing your strategy and setting priorities, to really understand what makes consumers tick. What’s really important to them.

Take the example of FMCG giant Unilever. Simon Clift, who recently retired from his position as CMO of the company, tells of the time when he was in a focus group of housewives in Brazil.  These were women who were holding their families together on £120 a week—yet they spent fully a third of their household budget on hair products by Unilever. Intrigued, he asked one woman why she spent so much on these products. She replied, simply yet profoundly: “Because my hair is the most beautiful thing I own.”

Hugo Saavedra

Epiphanies like this lead to deeply resonant consumer insights that can shatter long-held conventions of how to market whole categories of products. For example, parents worry daily that their young children will get dirty as they play. They unconsciously worry, too, that a child with a mud-stained T-shirt signals an irresponsible parenting style. It took an insightful marketer to appreciate this mindset—and an inspired idea to position OMO as the detergent that makes the dirt go away, while the learning stays. The “Dirt is good” campaign turned an entire category on its head.

Consumer immersion programs challenge people’s perceptions of who their customers are and how they use their products. More importantly, they create a culture of consumer-focused thinking within the organization from top to bottom. Some of the largest companies are obsessed with this. (Perhaps this is why they have enjoyed market success.) P&G, for instance, believes that by listening to consumers, observing them in their daily lives, and even living with them, their mission is more likely to succeed.

Companies like Unilever and P&G lead by example—their CEOs participate fully in the practice, modeling behavior for the rest of the organization to follow. When executed with consistency, this discipline ultimately leads to an improved customer experience.

However, consumer immersion can be practiced by any organization and anyone who decides that this is a priority. To understand what consumers really need, marketers can employ any number of immersion techniques: from ‘shop-along’ or ‘tag-along’, interviews with salespeople and customers, to home visits and ‘day in the life’ safaris. 

At EffectiveBrands, we advocate consumer immersion because of its potential to:

• Discover information that is not captured in research reports
• Fill in gaps of understanding in ways that data analysis will not come close to achieving
• Gain a deeper understanding of a consumer target’s unmet needs
• Validate research conclusions from other countries when local research is not available.

Once you’ve made the effort to truly understand consumers, you then need to define your target. Driving for this level of clarity will help you more easily prioritize your brand activation plan, and craft messages that will resonate with their worldview. Target definition should be approached on two levels:

1. A strategic target segment to whom your brand’s equity is most relevant and meaningful—this usually has universal consistency, and is large enough to achieve your long-term business goals
2. The prime prospect sub-group of the brand’s overall strategic target—this can vary across individual markets, and offers the greatest short-term growth opportunity

To identify a strategic target segment, a skilled marketer considers geographic, demographic and psychographic factors. Importantly, consumer 'need states' should also be considered, because they are focused on the underlying, often unarticulated drivers of consumer needs, irrespective of cultures or borders. 

A need-state framework maps the psychological and social aspects of a consumer’s mindset: the personality traits of introversion versus extroversion on the y-axis; and the ‘group-oriented’ versus ‘individually focused’ social traits on the x-axis:

Opportunity spaces can be identified by plotting concepts/brands on the map to arrive at motivational clusters or need states. These need states include the triggers and desired benefits that induce trial or product usage. Your strategic target segment will guide your brand development intent for the brand’s positioning, architecture and innovation pipeline.

To define a prime prospect sub-group of a target segment, it helps to pen a consumer portrait that is rich in actionable information. Remember that this is a subset of your strategic target (e.g. current users, new users, competitive users) unified by a specific consumer behaviour that you are trying to influence or change (e.g. use more quantity, use more often, switch). By holding up this sub-group and giving it definition and dimension, you’ll be better positioned to meet their unmet needs with relevant and compelling marketing activities.

EffectiveBrands suggests the 5W model to paint a prime prospect portrait. It’s essentially an intuitive tool that asks five simple questions:

1. Who is your consumer? (Demographic & psychographic characteristics)
2. What do they consume? (Product type, format, look & feel, texture, etc.)
3. When do they consume? (Triggers, purchase cycle)
4. Where do they use or buy the product/service? (Usage / purchase occasion)
5. Why do they consume? (Benefits, influencers, etc.)

In summary, successful marketers understand the impact of consumer immersion and proper customer segmentation:

1. They take pains to immerse themselves in their consumers’ world, seeking to understand what category they compete in within the audience’s mind.
2. They then cluster consumers into segments with distinct characteristics and identify need states—clusters of desired benefits that trigger demand.
3. They select the strategic target for long-term growth by leveraging segmentation and need states.
4. Finally, they identify the prime prospect group that will deliver short-term growth objectives.

Do this well, and you’ll be primed for similar success.

Please see the other articles in this continuing series.

Hugo Saavedra is a senior consultant with EffectiveBrands, a global marketing consulting firm dedicated to unleashing global brand potential. Based in Singapore, Saavedra has experience with clients including Mead Johnson Nutrition, Johnson & Johnson, and Campbell’s.

Theater image copyright 123RF Stock Photos.