Senior executives often end up distanced from their target market customers. Consumer insights can help bridge the empathy gap
It has become a regular routine. When the press writes about senior executives, it conveys what feels like false outrage about high salaries and bonuses. What it doesn’t talk about is the constant challenge faced by senior executives. To say they – you – have difficult jobs is an understatement. You are under constant pressure to deliver revenue and profit targets for shareholders or other owners. You see new products fall short of expectations, get hit by unexpected setbacks, and experience sales, share, and/or profit declines, among many other things.
Among all the demands on your time and attention, it can be easy to forget or lose sight of the consumer who purchases your products or services. While it’s correct that one of the main reasons for a company’s existence is to provide value to shareholders, there is no value without products and services that meet consumers’ needs and wants.
Yet we need to be honest that, because of those time and attention demands, there is usually a disconnect between executives and consumers. For the most part, you live very different lives from your consumers. Unless you are actively participating in the in-depth consumer research being conducted at your companies (which is impossible given your other major responsibilities), it’s very difficult to intimately know your consumer and their needs.
The unfortunate by-product of this is that it’s difficult to have empathy for the consumers you are trying to serve. This lack of consumer empathy – or a consumer-centric culture – leads to making product decisions based on your gut. History has shown us that this can cause disruption to the pursuit of company’s long-term growth goals – and at worst, can be disastrous, even threatening the very existence of a brand or company.
This is where effective consumer insights (CI) become critical for the long-term success of your company.
The value of consumer insights
Just like other areas of a business, it’s likely your CI function has had its ups and downs over the years. From your standpoint as an executive, you need actionable recommendations and strategic direction; you need consumer insights to be insightful and practical so they lead to more sales.
This is where the power of the partnership between executives and CI lies. It’s important to consult with and learn from your insights team, to merge the insights and empathy they have for your consumer with your expertise for business and the marketplace. This ensures innovation, products and marketing come from the right place.
Therefore, in that partnership with your CI department, there are three basic elements that can help you build better consumer empathy – assuming that you already have a foundational understanding of your target consumer.
Knowing these three things about your brand or company is also a useful guide for determining what you may need to figure out at your company: if even your CI department doesn’t know these three things, action is urgently needed.
1. The consumer conflict
Before understanding anything else, it’s important you know the major conflict that your target consumer deals with, and how your product helps them overcome that conflict. The error made by many senior executives is thinking their brand or product is the hero in the story. It is not. The consumer is always the heroine or hero, and your brand or product is a tool they use to overcome the conflict. Not knowing the conflict means your brand doesn’t have a purpose, and without a brand purpose, it’s impossible to position yourselves in the market, communicate with your consumers, and have empathy for them.
2. Consumer beliefs about your brand
Many executives like to think they dictate their brand’s perception and what it stands for. This is akin to thinking you can control what other people think and believe, which of course you can’t. Marty Neumeier said it very simply in his book Zag: “Your brand isn’t what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.” Simply put, your brand really isn’t owned by you or your company, but by the consumers who invest so much in it. The real question therefore is: Who are they?
This matters, because if you try to find out what all consumers say about your brand, you will get such a wide range of responses that you won’t know where to start. Focus instead on your target consumer – that one consumer you care most about, who your brand is most suited to, and who has an emotional connection with and love for your brand. When you know that, then you can begin to build your brand story in the most meaningful way possible, to resonate with that consumer. If you try to be all things to all people, you are nothing to anybody.
3. Consumer needs met by your brand
We have learned so much about human needs and emotion, yet these are often overlooked by many executives. After all, they are not easily explained in a quarterly shareholder call. As a result, you may hit your sales numbers from time to time, but your brand will never really grow. It’s important to understand your consumers are inspired in different ways to grow and evolve themselves. If your brand helps them do that, you will have the brand love, loyalty and price inelasticity for which we all hope.
Consumer insights are often under-utilized by senior leaders. Starting with these three basic understandings of your consumer will go a long way to developing the type of consumer-centric empathy that every company needs to deliver long-term, sustainable growth.
