Listen to Your Customers – Doing Your Marketing Research
November 18, 2008 by Jean Murray
I was talking this evening with a young couple who have an idea for a business. Their idea is great – they want to make beautiful handmade stone crosses. Like many home business owners, they don’t really get the importance of listening to their customers and doing research to figure out what customers want. Here is what I mean:
They were going to make a huge quantity of the crosses and then try to sell them. But they don’t know two things:
1. What is their market for their products? In other words, who is going to buy them? Churches? People at craft shows? Religious supply companies? People buying from a retailer in a mall? Who are these people? WHO will buy your products determines WHERE you will market and sell them. The only way to know that is to get out there and try to sell. Sell at craft shows, in mall events, at bazaars. Keep track of who buys and who doesn’t, what places give you lots of sales and what places don’t.
2. What benefits do the potential customers see in these crosses? For example, let’s say you made 1000 crosses and sold them at a craft show. And people kept coming up and saying, “I’d love one of these for a grave marker for my pet.” But you have been thinking you want to sell these as wall hangings. Are you going to say, “I don’t want to sell you pet grave markers?” Heck, no! You’ll sell to anyone who has a legitimate use for them. But you don’t know how the products will be perceived, and what usefulness people will see in the product, until you start selling them. If they are perceived as great for pet grave markers, you can then find pet shows to sell them at.
See what I mean? It is always about the customer. As Peter Drucker, the world’s foremost management guru said,
“The only valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer. What a business thinks it produces is not first importance…What the customer thinks he is buying, what he considers “value” …determines what a business is, what it produces, and whether it will prosper.”
It is not what you think you are selling, but what your customers think they are buying. And the only way to know that is to do market research.