Your customers, your bread and butter. They make or break your business. If they buy and continue to buy you are successful, if not, you are out of business. While this is quite cut and dry and the reality of what most businesses when planning do not want to break it down to, it is the reality of how a business operates. We need customers and customers need us. They need us to create the desire of need and we need to have them accept the need and desire that we are telling them that they need. A bit confusing but yet consumers/customers are not only ready and waiting for the message they are giving feedback that is more than their purchasing power.
Brand and Consumer Need and Want
As a brand, you create a buyer persona of whom you feel will be your target market and set out to talk to them. We strategize and analyze the numbers based upon our goals and objectives which is a big component of marketing as creating a marketing plan that talks to our target to create that emotional response of need and desire has been a staple of how we advertise since door to door salesmen, newspapers, radio, tv, cable tv, the internet and social media marketing. In the past we we not able to listen to our customers as we do today. Sure, we heard them through sales and repeat sales but is that an exact evaluation of how they felt about our brand? In some industries, yes but in others we cannot access the repeat sales to how they felt about the brand. Think of the consumer who buys a new air conditioning unit or a new water heater or the business who upgrades to a new software. We know that they are not in the market to get anew but yet they can be our most powerful when it comes to sales.
What Consumers and Customers Say
Consumers and customers say a lot. They always have. WOM is not new just as the conversation is not new. Social media did not create the conversation in the same way Al Gore did not create the internet (sorry Al, I had to go there). The conversation has always been there as we as people have needed the interaction with others that conversation affords. We cannot create and build relationships with others unless we have communication. Communication is the core of how we relate with people. We cannot relate without communicating in some way. As our conversations are not always verbal, we use our body language to express what we are thinking and how we feel. As consumers, we tell a story of what we like every day. The car we drive, the soap and the shampoo we bathe with, the clothes and shoes we wear. We tell a story every day that is attributed the brand … but is it?
How Consumers/Customers Talk to a Brand
We talk to a brand every day. We wear their clothes, use their products, drive their cars so that says a lot but is that out of necessity or out of the undying love for the brand? If the brand is “good to us” as far as meeting or surpassing our expectations we buy but is that enough for the brand? We may buy a brand because it hits our price point or we are influenced by our friends. We talk about a brand every day in how we represent ourselves through our appearance but yet we want our brand to notice us on the platforms we and the brand have a strong presence. As a brand, we go to where our customers are and they interact and hopefully take that further and dialogue is created but as a consumer/customer we also “wear” the brand by liking and linking. In social media, we talk to the brand in a way that is almost is immeasurable as if you are tracking likes vs those that comment your numbers are so far in the negative that buying power or even the influence is not a mathematics game. Your consumers/customers talk to you constantly but the bigger question is (possibly more than the sales numbers) is how do you react to their talking?
How A Brand Responds
A brand responds in a myriad of ways. They create new marketing plans based upon the consumer reaction. Many times that is based upon sales dollars and not upon the engagement of consumers. A new contest or a big sale that discounts you below the rest to drive sales when really consumer are wondering why you are so less than others; or the opposite of raising prices as Oh, we have hit the big time and we are worth it. A brand should respond the same way the consumer responds. The consumer needs to listen, understand and then make the decision to act.
Are you hearing your customers or waiting for them to wear or rave and then react?