By Vidisha Gaglani, CEO of Streetbees
Understanding consumers is a tricky task. Feelings are intangible and hard to quantify. However, truly knowing your audience is essential in order to stay relevant in the competitive landscape. This knowledge not only fuels product development strategies but can greatly support marketers in crafting campaigns tailored to how their audience actually thinks and feels – taking the guesswork out of catering to your ideal customer.
So where should brands start with attaining this insight? Research. Primary research is a powerful tool often under-utilised by brands that can delve deep into what their consumers think and feel. This research doesn’t have to be, and shouldn’t be, a one-time occurrence. Ongoing research can help business leaders get a 360-degree view of target customers. By doing this, brands can increase loyalty, and further refine their business strategy to ensure it resonates with the customers of today.
Three things should be considered when deciding how best to collect and leverage this data:
Consumer preferences can shift, fast
Often, a huge amount of time and resource is invested into understanding what consumers think right now. This data is indeed invaluable but what is important to note is that consumer preferences can shift. There are a number of different factors that can lead to these shifts, from major events such as the Olympics or the Euros, to routine moments in time, like seasons or cultural holidays. Different events, trends, and moments in time can reshape how consumers feel at a rapid pace.
Because of this, brands need to take a proactive approach in monitoring and understanding consumer sentiment. Disruptive events like pandemics and wars can upend the world as we know it, so capturing data on an ongoing basis is essential in understanding the shifts in choices, behaviours, and sentiments that inevitably follow these events. By taking a proactive approach to monitoring and analysing customer behaviour, companies can align their offerings with evolving needs and preferences, ensuring they remain relevant and resonate with their audience.
This approach helps address immediate concerns and shows that brands have their finger on the pulse and are truly committed to being customer centric. Brands can also anticipate future trends and adapt their strategies accordingly to stay ahead of the competition. The more you know about your audience, the better you can serve them, both now and in the long term.
The building blocks for trust and loyalty
Today’s brands are working harder than ever to communicate with a multi-generational audience. From Baby Boomers and Gen X, to Millennials, Gen Z and even Gen Alpha, each have their own wants and needs. With greater insight into each comes an opportunity for marketers to refine their positioning and messaging. Marketers can often prioritise approaches that will land them with instant virality. However, success in this format alone isn’t always guaranteed when preferences can shift. Marketers need to refresh their toolkit if they are to build brand loyalty and trust for years to come.
Alongside conducting research, brands should undertake social listening. Social listening provides spontaneous, unsolicited consumer opinions and feedback, emerging trends, and competitive intelligence that traditional research methods may miss. It allows brands to proactively identify potential crises, influential voices, and content opportunities. By tapping into the unfiltered conversations happening on social media, marketers can develop more agile, consumer-centric strategies that resonate with their audiences. Harnessing customer service team data and metrics, alongside social listening, can also provide a more holistic view of audiences that includes their priorities, frustrations, unmet needs, desires and more.
This multi-layered approach will fuel marketers’ ability to provide a 360 degree view of customers across multiple touchpoints, providing the insights needed to foster long term trust and loyalty.
Marketing with effectiveness
When crafting new campaigns or bringing new products to the market, those crafted with a deep understanding of the current consumer mindset are more likely to resonate and drive engagement. For example, our research with 859 shoppers in the US, the UK, Germany and France found that the top perceived benefits of buying items directly from brands, as opposed to multi-brand retailers or supermarkets, are better prices (42%), quality assurance (35%) and authenticity assurance (32%).
However, 52% said high pricing is the biggest disadvantage of buying directly from a brand, showing strong polarisation among shoppers. Additional disadvantages included limited variety (16%) and long shipping times (13%).
With this knowledge, brands have an opportunity to revamp how they market to their customer base, shifting budget towards campaigns that will deliver more impact for the brand. Ultimately, knowing what drives a customer’s purchase decision, where and when they shop, how they like to be spoken to, and what external factors affect their spending habits, allows brands to create highly personalised and targeted strategies. If a brand can keep this up, they’re in a good position to retain existing customers and win new ones.
The convergence of tech and brands 