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Customer-centric marketing is a simple concept. It merely involves understanding what motivates customers to buy and keep buying, and to build your services, products and campaigns around those motivations. The question is: How do we know what a customer really thinks? The usual answer is "By asking the customer for his or her feedback through interactivity, surveys, questionnaires, exit polls, research, etc." Wrong. Customers have a separate set of motivations when they interact or respond to questions than they do when actually making decisions based on more intimate, personal motivations.
When we act based solely upon solicited customer input, we are often acting of distorted or inaccurate information. When we correlate customer behavior and results, we are getting unbiased data, without interfering or conflicting motivations. Asking is helpful. Observing and measuring is far, far better.
A customer's actions (ad campaign responsiveness, word-of-mouth marketing, evangelizing other customers, complaining about service, return visits and purchases, refunds and exchanges, upselling, loyalty)... are based entirely on customer-centric motivations, while answers to solicited questions generate very fuzzy, sometimes opposite data. This is because customers don't always tell us what really moves them -- they (for various reasons, a few of which are listed below). They are telling us what they want us to believe that they think -- yep -- sometimes they fib. Why do they behave in this way?
1) They don't want to reveal personal information;
2) They just want to tell us what they anticipate that we'd like to hear;
3) They have some reason to want to mislead us;
4) They don't actually know what exactly it is that motivates them. It's based upon something buried in the subconscious, or not even what they think it is;
5) We might not know either what questions to ask or how to frame them in order to obtain meaningful answers.
When building a customer psycho-graphic profile (just like the Behavioral Analysis Unit on TV's Criminal Minds!) we must study correlatively and then causally study customer stimulus response to what we do. And this means vigilance and metrics. Trial and error. Experimentation.
A terrific webcast series on the above keypoint critical topic follows from Omniture, and it has been neatly packaged and presented by Adobe. It is filled with the truth about customer behavior, and to positively use that knowledge to market more efficiently and effectively. Now boldly proceed and click on the link, oh followers of The Mad Marketing Tactics Blog:
FOCUS ON WHAT CUSTOMERS DO, NOT WHAT THEY SAY
Now that you've seen it all, the lesson is the same one as grandma told you while she dispensed wisdom along with molasses and gingerbread cookies: "Actions speak louder than words," and, of course [with apologies and respects to the late Marvin Gaye], "Believe half of what you see and none of what you hear."
Do you want successful, potent campaigns? Sure you do! -- At least that's what you'd tell me.
Well remember what grandma said. Bless her discretely manipulative heart...
Douglas E. Castle
#MadMarketing
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