Marketing people toss around the kinds of terminology that make the average “consumer” just plan anti-advertising. Some terms we’ve heard a lot lately are “customer ecosystem”; “customer experience”; and “personas.” While these are nominally part of the effort to create more engaged and loyal customers, they also reflect companies’ desire to collect, analyze and deploy “Big Data” to make more money.
Big data has a definite drawback: it seems to foster a “remote” view of the individuals on the receiving end of marketing messages. Companies want to push marketing messages and pull customer interaction and traffic. They think they can learn all there is to know about customers from collecting, mining and analyzing data the resulting data. In other words, from the consumer perspective, it turns customers into not just a number, but lots of numbers… while also invading customer privacy and using “creepy” online tracking methods to assess behavior and habits.
Customers Are People, Not Numbers
To some extent, companies can learn much from data. But all of this data overlooks one factor in brand/customer relations: the human factor. Customers are people, after all, and most of them are unhappy when treated like the source for masses of data to be used in manipulating them into buying more stuff.
That is why agencies should actively seek opportunities to speak directly with customers. Data can provide many granular statistics about customers—proportion of men to women, most motivated age groups, key audience interests, preferences, etc.—but sometimes key insights are difficult to glean from hard data. It’s remarkable what can be revealed in a direct conversation with a real human being.
Conduct in-store or exit interviews. Do “man on the street” polling. Call customers and conduct brief surveys, or just ask opinions. Clients are always impressed to hear that their agency actually talked with real live customers. And the insights you gain can be invaluable.
The Woman on the Street
One agency principal we know was shopping when she saw another shopper reading the product information on the side of a package. She introduced herself, then asked the woman what kinds of information were important to her. The answers surprised her.
“I want to be better at managing sodium and sugar intake in home meals,” she said. “So much packaged food is overloaded with both. So I always check package ingredients. I also check the ‘per serving’ info. Lots of smaller packages might seem to be a single serving, but the serving size may actually be half or even a quarter of the package. That makes a big difference in how much I may allow my kids to have. It may even mean I’ll opt for a different size package so my kids can grab one and get a single serving.”
The agency principal was impressed that the woman gave such thought to her purchases. She wondered if that deeper thinking was typical. She had a snack foods client who might like such insights. So she put together a detailed survey, got permission from the store to survey shoppers, and videotaped her surveys. Then she compiled the surveys into a single video that she shared with the client.
The result was that the company began planning single-serve packages of one of their popular snack products, and may introduce a new snack featuring less sodium and sugar in the near future. The video eventually made its way to the client CEO. And the agency won a bonus for discovering and sharing valuable customer insights—insights not revealed by Big Data.
The Voice of the Customer
Think about direct customer research as the “big data” obsession continues to evolve. Agencies can supply the perspective that the customer is not solely compiled-and-crunched numbers, but a unique individual who can and will speak up if not accorded a human level of respect. The human factor is an essential part of customer research, and an area where advertising agencies and marketing firms can and should continue to bring value. Be the voice of the customer for all of your clients, and help keep client marketing efforts from becoming too remote.
