Think you “Know” Your Customers? Think Again

By Michael R. Solomon, Ph.D who discusses how to learn more about your customers.

Whether you’re based in Ireland or elsewhere you can see it all around you (maybe even in the mirror!).  Today a lot of consumers defy categorization – sometimes deliberately.  They yearn to be liberated from cubicles, labels, “market segments,” and especially those confining cages that restrict them from expressing the unique self they have constructed out of all the lifestyle “raw materials” that marketers of many stripes have to offer.  Their lives are a work in progress, and always in beta.

We didn’t appreciate it then. But in “the good old days” (say, a few decades ago), marketers had it pretty easy.  Customers respected authority figures, and we had a pretty good idea of where to locate these people and how to enlist them to sell for us.  There were just a handful of TV stations, some popular radio stations, and large circulation print magazines that almost everyone read to learn about the world – and about what to buy.

At that time, we thought of the world in terms of very broad categories.  We had First World versus Third World, The Young and The Old, Guys and Dolls, and Our People versus The Other People.  As we emerged from the throes of World War II, the marketing machine revved up to provide us with the spoils of prosperity – but without a lot of variations to choose from.  There was so much pent-up demand following the deprivations of wartime that people with newly-found money to spend weren’t that picky about the details – and the pressures to conform to what others chose were pretty fierce as well.

Indeed, even decades before WWII, Henry Ford famously boasted that his customers could buy one of his cars in any color they liked, so long as it was black.  That one-size-fits-all approach made sense in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, when mass production was all about maximizing efficiency and output.  And even though this orthodoxy started to loosen up after The Great Depression and then through the post-war years, we remained much more of a cookie-cutter society than we are now (especially since by and large the notion of cultural diversity was still a pipe dream).

Our shift from a monolithic structure to a multilithic one (OK, I made that word up) began to change in the 1950s, as consumer groups began to splinter into smaller and smaller niches. Mass-circulation periodicals faded into history, to be replaced by a multiplicity of specialized magazines.  Editors discovered that they could better compete by helping advertisers to reach more finely defined audiences with specific needs and tastes.

Guess what?  The party’s over, folks.  For years, we’ve been able to get away with putting our customers into neat little cages, as we grouped them according to fairly broad ranges of age or income, or we pigeonholed them by gender.  New ideas, new products, and new styles came to life in mass media, so not surprisingly most people adopted them en masse. Year by year, we had clear winners in domains like hit songs, clothing styles, home furnishings, etc.

That monolithic strategy just doesn’t wash in a world where tranquilized consumers are waking up and shaking those cages.  Today many of us no longer accept the labels marketers assign to us, and with good reason.  We just don’t conform to the assumptions they make about what we do, think and buy.  There’s a bit of a consumer revolution afoot.

That revolution requires marketers to revisit the cages they’ve erected over many years.  And no one is saying that’s an easy thing to do. Conventional marketing strategies are built upon predictability, stability and the comfort that comes from knowing that we “understand” our customer yesterday, today and tomorrow.  To accomplish this, we love to put people into categories and often into super-neat dichotomies – and call it a day.

Unfortunately, that strong tendency also is a prime example of what psychologists call a nominal fallacy; the belief that because we have given a name to something, we have therefore explained it.  So, we blissfully describe our target markets with peppy terms like Millennials, Empty Nesters, Henrys (High Earners, Not Rich Yet), Recreational Shoppers, etc. Then we congratulate ourselves, secure in the knowledge that we now understand what makes these folks tick. We have safely placed them into their cages and affixed cute labels on the doors.

Those cages used to be solid, and marketers relied upon them to build a structure that formed the basis of their traditional strategic worldview. This rather simplistic approach worked really well for a lot of years, so marketers can’t be blamed for continuing to rely upon it. But that’s no longer the case.  Now many of these comfortable cages are opening – and fast. Consumer chameleons are climbing out of them at warp speed, while others are sniffing the air and starting to think about doing the same.

Don’t despair!  Creative destruction is a good thing.  We need to open these cages if we’re going to thrive in today’s cutthroat market. But it’s really, really tough to give up the security that comes from thinking you know exactly who your customers are.

That’s one reason why it’s valuable to use multiple research methods where possible in order to triangulate on an issue.  This might involve a combination of controlled/sterile experiments with uncontrolled/realistic observations of consumers in their natural habitats so that hopefully the results will converge across methods. Also, take the customer journey yourself!  Too many times managers sit in their plush offices and imagine what their customers experience rather than doing what the Japanese call going to the gemba (roughly, the exact place at which the event occurs).

It’s only by living the experience in their shoes that you can truly appreciate the problem.  So, take a deep breath, and get ready to unlock those cage doors. Your consumer chameleons await.

Michael Solomon is a Global Consumer Behaviour Expert and the author of The New Chameleons: How to Connect with Consumers Who Defy Categorization, published by Kogan Page priced £14.99

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