Surfing the web and discussing products and brands is almost as fun as making a purchase!
However, why is consumer knowledge important to managers, advertisers, and other marketing professionals? Why is it so crucial to know what makes your customers tick?
Knowing the answers to these questions helps businesses create effective marketing campaigns that resonate with their customers, since marketing success is (arguably) all about meeting the needs of consumers.
To achieve the above, marketers first need to understand the individuals or firms (consumers) who will use their products and services. This is because consumer feedback is essential to determining the success of a marketing strategy.
In other words, consumer feedback is often perceived as the final check for determining whether a marketing strategy will be successful or not.
For this singular reason, understanding consumers is critical to every aspect of an effective marketing plan.
Aside from understanding the consumer, it is also important for marketers to acquire consumer insights or data.
Consumer insights assist marketing practitioners in defining the market (segmentation and targeting) while detecting threats and opportunities in the environment of operation, and how those factors influence consumers’ approval or disapproval of a product or service.
Sony’s Walkman cassette player, for example, illustrates how customers may accept or reject a product when tested on the market. Although the introduction of the Walkman was met with some skepticism, it later became a huge success.
Sony had succeeded in changing how people listened to music and managed to sell nearly 300 million Walkman across the globe in the process.
It was reported that the advertising agency that oversaw this massive, game-changing move studied more than 125 teenagers to see how they use products daily.
They discovered that consumers preferred removable memory sticks to CD players that could play MP3 files.
To appeal to this modern and culturally diverse market, they created an alien character named Plato to promote the Walkman. “An alien is no one, so an alien is everyone,” explained the account director.
Another cogent example is the Colgate Tartar Control campaign, which used insights from a consumer group discussion on dental hygiene to inform its advertising campaign.
One woman, during one of the focus group discussions, good-humoredly said tartar felt “like a wall” on her teeth. The ad agency quickly responded with a depiction of a room-sized teeth covered in “tartar wall” in its next Colgate Tartar Control ad.
Lastly, researchers for a Swiss chocolate manufacturer discovered many chocolate lovers kept secret ‘stashes’ around their homes. One respondent admitted to stashing chocolate bars in her lingerie drawer.
As a result, the theme of the ad campaign was changed to “The True Confessions of Chocoholics,” and this was how the Swiss chocolate became a global hit.
In conclusion, understanding consumer behavior is good for business! By learning about your customers’ needs, preferences, and habits, you can create products and services they will love while creating relatable marketing campaigns, as highlighted in the examples above.
CASE REFERENCES:
Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh MacKay and Keith Negus, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (London: Sage, 1997).
Solomon, M., Bamossy, G., Askegaard, S., & Hogg, M. K. (2006). Consumer Behavior: A European Perspective (3rd ed.). Pearson P T R.