Mar 3, 2010

Stop Treating Your Customers Like ConsumersBy Jillian LakritzMediaPost.com

I was having coffee recently with a brand manager from a multibillion-dollar food and beverage company who was struggling with the launch of a new brand. “We need to be entrepreneurial,” he said, “but I don’t know how. How do I start thinking like an entrepreneur?”

As we continued to talk about the presumed consumer need and the demographics driving their marketing decisions, it struck me that the biggest opportunity he was missing to think like an entrepreneur was to stop treating the people who buy his product like consumers and start treating them like customers.

Customers are people we meet in the marketplace — they have a face and a name. Consumers are people we get to know in PowerPoint decks and belong to cohorts with catchy titles like “Active Annie” or “Budget-Conscious Bob.” Customers talk to you when they buy your product and give you real-time, real-life feedback that includes the good, the bad and the ugly.

Consumers are recruited by focus group facilities and get paid to answer questions from a discussion guide. Customers are complex. Their problems are unpredictable and force you to think creatively and make changes quickly in order to earn their loyalty. Consumers are homogeneous. Their problems exist as data points and are often solved by tinkering with concept statements while sitting behind a desk.

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