How well do you know your customers? I mean more than demographics and behaviour but actually seeing things through their eyes.
We all tend to live within our own bubble, interacting on a daily basis with people similar to ourselves. This can make it difficult to really understand customers whose lives might be very different to our own. As a researcher, one of things I most enjoy about my job is having the opportunity to meet and talk with people who have had different experiences to myself.
Working in the industry day-in and day-out we can forget how ordinary people actually think about and understand it. We forget that people don’t necessarily know what we know or see what we see.
Customer closeness refers to the depth of the relationship between a brand and its customers. It isn’t just about knowing their perspective, it is also about actually feeling it, and it is this aspect that has most impact. There is a reason why I can still remember conversations I’ve had with participants years later but can’t remember a graph on a page I presented a few weeks ago!
What are the benefits of customer closeness?
There are many ways that getting closer to the customer can benefit your business, for example:
Supporting NPD By really understanding your customers, you can better identify needs and tensions that you can look to solve.
Making existing products or packaging better Through customer closeness you may be able to discover ways to make customers’ experiences with your existing products or packaging better. Even a small change to improve ease of opening, storage, or use could potentially have a positive impact on sales.
Anticipating change By staying close to your customers regularly, you can also better anticipate changing needs or sentiment and therefore respond more quickly.
Building emotional connections For brands, it is important to build emotional connections with your audience, getting closer to your customers will help you to identify ways you can develop and maintain your emotional rather than just functional connections.
How can you get closer to your customers?
The idea of getting closer to the customer certainly isn’t new, but in our data driven age of dashboards and metrics it’s easy to forget. Before I entered the world of food and drink, I worked in financial services. At the time one provider, MBNA, rather than just relying on customer experience metrics, required all heads of department upwards listen to live customer calls for 4 hours a month, to stay close to the customer. Its company moto was ‘think of yourself as the customer’.
In food and drink there are also many ways you can get closer to the customer, and it doesn’t need to cost a lot. The example I gave above for MBNA only cost their time away from their day-to-day jobs.
Customer closeness research tends to be qualitative by nature as we are aiming to get beyond surface level responses to dig deeper. Some examples are below:
1. Observation This is about seeing how your customers shop, live or use your products. This can be done in person through methods such as shop-alongs or cook-alongs, or remotely. With our Levercliff Lens service we ask participants to record in the moment videos and pictures of themselves shopping for, cooking with, storing or consuming products, and then through our platform we then interact with them to dig deeper. This provides our clients with a window into how their customers interact with their products in their daily lives.
2. Product Testing Rather than classic taste testing where you receive a report based on defined metrics, why not recruit a sample of participants to video themselves trying the products in their own home. At Levercliff we use this methodology within our Levercliff Test service, by observing things such as facial expressions, how products hold together when consumed, and interaction with packaging, achieving richer insights than just relying on what is said verbally or scores out of ten.
3. Listening At the simplest level just listening to how customers talk about your category and products in focus groups or depth interviews can be eye opening.
If you have the opportunity to talk to or listen to your customers, seize it; words, figures and graphs on a page only go so far, the best change can come from personal interaction and experience.
How Levercliff can help
At Levercliff we specialise in understanding consumers and shoppers in food and drink categories. We can find the best approach to answer your business questions, and deliver actionable insights grounded in the reality of your category and business. Combined with our category management knowledge, we can deliver a wide range of shopper and consumer research and insight to help your business grow. Drop us a message if you’d like to know more.
Written by Clair Prior, Consumer Insight Manager
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