Brand: Are you driving your business blind?
At the end of the business day your customer pays your bills, they cover your payroll, they generate your revenue and they produce your profits.
Your customers loyal patronage also covers your general life expenses, they pay your mortgage; keep a roof over your head, pay for your annual holiday (if you stick to the budget and make the time), service and run the family car(s), provide the money for little Oliver or Charlotte to receive an education, as well as providing the uniform on their backs to keep them warm during the cold and wet Victoria winter (and let’s not forget they also help to cover those expanding energy bills!).
Ultimately it’s your customer who helps you create your lifestyle and determines the quality of your life. In this way your sales and business performance are a true mirror reflection of your ability to service your customers’ needs and wants.
So it begs the question, why wouldn’t you invest the time to get to know that special someone – that special stranger – who performs such a critical part of your life? The huge irony and crazy thing is that most businesses barely know who their customer is – never mind their ‘ideal’ customer and they fail to see the value in digging deeper to truly understand what makes their ideal customer tick.
What if we could discover not only the true reasons why your customer buys from you (its rarely for the reasons that you think) but also discover insights that could reveal ways for you to increase repeat business and revenue?
For your part, your role in this micro ‘virtual reality TV series’ of your own making is simply to make sure you deliver the product (i.e. deliver on your brand promise) which means that you’re essentially in the driving seat of your own delivery van.
But what if you were driving the delivery van with the windows steamed up?
How would you know where to go?
How would you know who or what you were looking at outside the front windscreen?
How could you ‘steer the ship’ without knowing where ‘Port’ is?
You’d have no point of reference.
What if you were driving your business ‘blind’ without even knowing it?
Not knowing your ideal customer is akin to driving your delivery van with the whole windscreen fogged up and wearing sunglasses or shades for added effect. Without this point of reference you are simply drifting in the middle lane – literally on the road to nowhere. You may have a good product but if you don’t know who is ideally suited to benefit from your specific product or service then you’re just driving your delivery van around with no understanding of the true purpose of why your customers’ buy from you in the first place.
There are some businesses and business owners who think they have a good understanding of their customer already. That might well be true – they may know just enough to keep their customer on their radar with an annual check up or audit to keep them ticking over on your database from year to year. But life is change and your customer changes. And so must you.
Wouldn’t it make better business sense to improve those loose relationships and truly understand the motivations behind your customers purchases? Those revelations may well help your business grow to get to the next level.
In reality I’ve found that businesses only have a vague reference of who their customer is – and usually its superficial knowledge at best that barely scratch the surface.
Effectively this leaves you driving your delivery van blind at the wheel – not a wise strategy.
So be sure to check your mirrors and windscreen to see if you’re driving blind at the wheel today.
It may well be time to open those eyes, wipe the glasses and get laser-focused and clarity on your ideal customer.
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I hope you gained some benefit or learned something new, insightful or useful from this blog.
As The Brand Entrepreneur, I believe in helping busy business owners and savvy entrepreneurs to be bold when building brands and ‘market smarter’ by deeply defining their ‘ideal’ customer with The ‘My Avatar’ Workshop. Successful brands in the future care about customers, not branding. I believe that future is now. I’m passionate and focused on creating brand stories and design assets that help brands get ‘in sync’ and connected to ‘customers’ they ‘care’ about.
Jamie Thomas – The Brand Entrepreneur