August 6, 2009

BE DiFFERENT Marketing Practice #3: Discover Customer Secrets

BE DiFFERENT Marketing Practice #2 stipulates that organizations must institutionalize a continuous process of learning about their customers and that they adopt this capability as a core competency - to outsource is to BE SAME. So what type of customer information do we seek to learn? The bottom line is that most organizations try to determine what customers need and want; this does not go far enough to BE DiFFERENT!

The objective of Customer Learning is to discover Customer Secrets, the deepest, most intimate desires of WHO you intend to SERVE. Customer needs operate at the highest most superficial level (what telecom product needs does the target group have), whereas Customer Secrets operate at the lowest, detailed most intimate level (what recreational, travel and culinary delights does the person have?). You get the difference in approach.

Why is the secret level important? Well, other organizations will simply not possess the same information on a customer group and you therefore will be in the driver’s seat to apply the information in your Holistic Offer creation process and achieve an unmatched position in the market. Everyone else will be busy bundling things together based on narrowly defined customer needs, and you will blow by ‘em with relevant compelling Offers which deliver the intimate value expressed by your target customer group. Will it be easy to copy your Offer? Not likely - customer secrets are market power which few will possess.

Where do you get secrets? You need to build a trusting relationship with your customers and engage them in a conversation where they reveal this information to you because they believe you will use it to benefit them. I am not talking about violating privacy laws here; rather listening intently to what people chose to tell you and then using it to create value they are quite willing to pay for. That’s what marketing is all about, isn’t it?

Absolutely!

Cheers, Roy Osing

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Related Blogs:
Customerize your Marketing
Customerize Practice #1 Create Holistic Value Based Offers
Customerize Practice #2 Institutionalize Customer Learning

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Posted 8.6.09 at 06:21 am by Roy Osing | Read Comments (0) | Leave a Comment