A great place to start if you want to market untapped potential is by asking those who know you best - your customers...
Having attended many briefing sessions in which CEOs, Marketing Directors and Senior Management figures have spoken about their brand’s strengths, key products, customer demographics and historical business wins and challenges.
A picture is painted of their agreed-upon brand strengths and values – and for the most part everyone around the table acquiesces to this established vision. But then occasionally someone from the sales team or customer services will be brave enough to pipe up and explain “With all due respect, I’m not sure that is actually how our customers see us…”
Often new areas of potential can be seen better from those outside of the organisation.
The Marty Neumeier definition of brand being ‘a customer’s gut feeling about a product, service or company*’ means in this age of continual, world-wide communication you don’t get the final say in what you do well. Your customer does.
Be brave enough to face honest feedback from your customers. Harness the positivity and look for areas of potential growth within the more unexpected comments.
Bite-sized Case Study
Checking in with your end customers is critical to understanding what makes your business so attractive to them.
Having previously worked for a large, global, life science organisation the general consensus amongst their marketing team was that large-spending pharmaceutical clients were drawn to them because of their vast array of sub-brands and products.
However, as part of our design process we asked for clarification from their key customers.
Subsequently it transpired that another more critical reason for their success was the personal relationships these clients could have with the experts from whom they bought. This life science company had a peerless reputation for working on some of the most significant scientific advancements of the past three decades.
It wasn’t just the products people were buying, it was their unrivalled insights and experience.
'Partnership' then became the successful sales message within our campaign, rather than simply their vast array of innovative products.
Action points: How do your customers see you?
✅ Ask your customers, sales team and customer services teams where they see your strengths.
✅ This could be as simple as a phone call, casual conversation, incentivised online questionnaire. SurveyMonkey or Google Forms provide this service free of charge.
✅ Why do your customer’s say they choose you over over similar organisations? Review these areas of mutual agreement and double down on promoting these aspects.
Use this information to bolster the existing strengths and proven areas of potential growth or re-align your marketing message to your client’s real attraction to your brand.