Knowing What Customers you want to Serve.

Its always easy to ride on the enthusiasm wave to start up a business and get disappointed as soon as your so called customers or market doesn't perceive your business or product or services as interesting as you think. Well it happens to every one who doesn't do a little homework (one of the things you hate? I know) before venturing in to conquer the minds and hearts of the customers. There is good old reason in using the phrase "minds and hearts of Customers" which is the topic of my next post. Coming back to this one, let us first consider the environment in which we are in. Long gone are the days where the business needs to find the customers. This is the age where the customers try to find the right Business for them and hence the question " Do you know what customers you want to serve?" makes more sense as the customers always exist. At this point it is more apt to quote Theodore Levitt, the father of modern marketing who clearly explained "Marketing Myopia" and laid foundations to modern business success through his article on " What Business Are you in? (you can read the entire article here  : What Business are you in? ). I think it is essential and take it as a first step in understanding what business we are in to chalk out the strategy and positioning aspect and taking it a little further to succeed is knowing what customers you want to serve.

Fortunately, there are lots of ways you can know more about the customer than 10 years ago and guess what? the consumer black box is turning transparent now. Every netizen on the planet is eager to lay down their digital foot print which is a valuable contribution for the business to dissect the customer segmentation and target the niche areas. Here are the simple steps to know what customer you want to target or serve.

Step 1 - Its always Knowing your Business - find your exact market rather than generalization. For example, if you are soft drink maker who invented an amazing recipe, find the best attributes of it like fruit based or flavour based or health based etc.

Step 2 - Knowing the Market - What is the market position of this kind of Business you want to jump in. Is it more B2B or B2C. First stick to one market unless you have really heavy muscle power either to dislocate the players or push your product into the market

Step 3 -Know your customers - I know I am using the word customers rather than prospects, because my friend we moved from building a business to find customers to building business to reach the customers. Before I digress let me finish the step. Knowing the customers is not just segmenting them based on the common out loud traits but finding the silent traits hidden beneath the statements. This is an interesting article on segmentation from Adobe blogs : Digital Marketing Segmentation which throws some light on what we may miss out.

Step 4 - Keep Simple but (St)Right - Once steps 1 to 3 are covered, its time to lay the road straight for the customers to come to you. It is a little tricky as laying the road involves triggering the right touch points, less curves and less speed bumps (this is a topic in itself) and making your shop clearly visible even from afar.

As ending note for this blog, many say it is easier said than done but I would say it is not impossible and anything impossible is doable with the right tools.

cheers
Charan