More importantly, we forget that in many if not all cases, all these different identities are just one person. These many customers aren't different people who behave differently. Our customer also shops with the competition. Our customer is the competition's customer.
This is not trivial. We draw up pen-portraits, day-in-life's, mood-boards of preferences and so on and forth for these supposedly different characters. We do qualitative research around customer groups that are 'our customers' and 'our lapsers' or 'competition customers' to understand them better. If we see the same person turning up in two groups, we suspect incorrect recruitment if not foul-play and impersonation. How could the agency mix up our customers with theirs? Or customers with non-customers? Sounds familiar?
If there are more men in the people who end up converting on my platform versus my competitor's, this may show up as 'our customer is 70% male while our competitor's is 80% female'. I think it starts off being a small poetic license (the use of the singular) and ends up sounding inane. There is no one out there who is 70% or 20% male.
Reality check - it gives us great pleasure to prick this balloon with the pin of knowledge you had all along. These different characters with their distinct unique personalities are like the average man. Like the man with exactly the average height, weight, hair and nose-length - who doesn't exist.
These customers - yours and mine, are heuristics, short-cuts, simplifications - and just that.
What we really should be talking about, and thinking about - are different need-states. In one need-state, a customer prefers my shop and in another, my competitor's. That's really what it is.
If my eCommerce platform, for example, is great for technology products and not so great for lifestyle products, the same customer, in the lifestyle need-state is my competitor's customer and when in the technology frame-of-mind, is my customer. A frequent misread of this state is as follows: my customer is a technology buyer and the competitor's is a lifestyle buyer. Familiar?
So what?
A lot of things. Just as a starting example, do you think segmenting users or customers makes more sense now or segmenting need-states, use-cases or states-of-mind? Litmus - think of yourself, are you ever just one brand's customer?
Another great post Ratul. I believe deeply that segmentation should span across both demographics and need states as you say. One thing that you may have touched on here but not dive deep into was better understanding the "why".
ReplyDeleteUsing your example I will embellish:
If the customer is buying tech from you and lifestyle from another is this ok with you? Does this mean that you are profiting well and should bolster the tech line and potentially remove the lifestyle products? Or is there chance that with a specific insight you can make the necessary changes that would strengthen your position in lifestlye.
So, as strategists it sometimes it actually makes more sense to understand why your customer of tech is not a customer of lifestlyle and research to close that gap.
Great point, Keith
DeleteYou're right, the most important question is 'Why' and that's probably best discussed as a separate post on Consumer Value Propositions.
Sometimes it's okay for me if my tech customer is not buying lifestyle from me when it does not make business sense to service that customer for lifestyle, the cost of building the inventory or services that he wants is prohibitive and so on. Sometimes it is not okay. I want him back on my site, I value his engagement and spend and then I'll go out to understand him better, the 'why' better and build out the experience he seeks.
The key would be to understand what this customer calls value and how can I create that for him.