Putting yourself in your customer’s shoes
Creating a company and the subsequent brand that goes with that company is an exciting and nerve wrenching time. At the early stages, there are a million different things to take into account. For every opportunity there is a challenge, such as predicting how the market is going to react to what you have to offer. Thus, it is of extreme importance to place yourself in your customer’s shoes when starting a business. More importantly, this sentiment should not change as a business develops and grows – seeing from the customer’s point of view is a value that needs to be woven right through your business.
Of course, this isn’t any new information, various forms of market research have been around for decades, some of them, even coming up to a century. Yet, these methods have obviously changed over time as technology, and what it allows the researcher and marketer to do has developed. Understanding your market also changes as you progress from a smaller company to a larger one. During this process of expansion, it is especially important to have insights into your target market, as you need to make sure the money being invested in your expansion will repay itself. In other words, you need to make sure the changes that occur during growth correlate with that of the wants and needs both of your current customers and those you hope to find.
There are of course methods and tools that can help gain valuable insights and place you in your customer’s shoes. For example, if you’re looking for a consumer insight agency, London has many for you to choose from. They benefit from the entrepreneurial opportunities in the city, with the latest technology pushed to its limit by clients hungry for data. A consumer insight agency helps you understand as potential customers needs and wants change and allow your business to evolve as your customers habits do, rather than having to play catch up. This sort of information is often used in three different areas of a business: product development, marketing and strategy. Consumer insight can mould and change how all three of these areas work completely.
Hopefully this has shown some of the potential of consumer insights for both business small and large, and more generally, why it is important for a business to regularly put itself in their customer’s shoes.
