“The customer is always right.” This old business adage rings more accurate today than ever before. Customers have more choices than ever in our highly competitive, globalised economy. They can find dozens of alternatives to your product or service with just a few mouse clicks.
This means that to thrive in today’s marketplace, you must obsessively focus on your customers and their needs. You must put the customer front and centre in all your business decisions – in other words, you must be customer-centric.
What does it mean to be customer-centric?
At its core, a customer-centric business considers the customer’s needs, perspectives, and priorities in every decision. From product development to promotions to customer service and more, a customer-centric organisation asks how this benefits our customers and aligns with what our customers really want.
The advantages of this approach are clear. By truly understanding your customers inside and out, you can provide much more relevant products and services tailored specifically to them. This leads to higher satisfaction, increased loyalty, more referrals and repeat business. In short, becoming customer-centric drives sales growth and profitability.
However, there’s one major problem – how exactly do you know what your customers really want? How can you truly get inside their heads?
This is where market research comes in. Properly designed market research provides the missing link – the customer’s voice. It takes you from guesswork about what your audience might want to certainty about what they actually want.
In other words, market research is the fundamental foundation for building a customer-centric business in today’s market. Here’s why it’s so important.
Debunks Misconceptions
It’s natural for a business leader to understand their customers well. After all, you talk to them often and examine sales reports and feedback. However, relying on assumptions and conventional wisdom rather than facts is remarkably easy.
For example, the leadership team at a software firm was convinced that the #1 desire of their customers was getting quick responses to support tickets. However, when they surveyed customers, they were shocked to learn the top request was easier-to-understand billing statements.
Market research techniques like surveys, interviews, and focus groups directly ask target customers what they think, feel, need and want. This primary data exposes false assumptions and debunks misconceptions commonly held within organisations.
By going straight to the source – your customers – you uncover their true priorities, not just what you think they are. This informs business strategy and prevents wasted time and resources on possibilities that sound logical but don’t actually move the needle with customers.
Reveals True Needs
Customers don’t always know what they want – or at least, they don’t communicate it clearly. When asked directly, they may provide only superficial answers about their preferences. Yet there may be deeper, more complex needs hiding under the surface.
For example, a company selling B2B software believed they needed more features to satisfy customers. However, ethnographic research studying how clients actually used the software revealed most weren’t even aware of many existing features! What they really needed was a simpler user interface and better onboarding to access existing capabilities.
Observational research techniques like ethnographies uncover people’s unarticulated needs. By seeing first-hand how customers interact with products and services in real-life settings, researchers can identify their true requirements. These insights may never emerge from surveys or focus groups alone.
Advanced analytics can also reveal hidden needs. For example, statistical modelling may connect various customer survey responses to reveal an underlying demand for quicker delivery times. This latent need might reflect widespread customer expectations that no one stated outright but represent an opportunity for differentiation.
Uncovering these concealed needs allows you to deliver superior solutions tailored to how customers truly use and benefit from your offering. Market research helps you build what customers want but cannot clearly communicate.
Quantifies the Market
Today’s executives want more than mere anecdotes or qualitative insights – they want compelling numerical evidence. Fortunately, market research provides hard statistics revealing both what customers think and, even more importantly, what they actually do.
For example, surveys with carefully selected representative samples produce valuable quantitative data. You can state with 95% confidence that X% of customers agree fast shipping is paramount or that Y% would be very likely to purchase again based on sample results. Powerful stats like these grab leadership’s attention.
Big data analytics measure real customer behaviours from sales records, website activity, app usage metrics and more. Correlating behaviours to attributes can uncover priority segments to target or impactful ways to tailor messaging.
This numerical information carries much more weight than vague discussions around what customers “seem to want.” The numbers also lend themselves easily to charts and graphs communicating key takeaways. Quantifying market dynamics builds an evidence-based case for proposed initiatives and clearly ties them to benefiting the customer.
Guides Innovation
Delivering excellent products, services, and experiences requires innovation. However, limited time and resources constrain the number of new offerings any business can develop. The question becomes: where do you focus innovation?
This is why Steve Jobs once said, “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Market research, particularly observational studies, shows customers’ concepts, prototypes and simulations. This provides feedback on what resonates based on actual reactions rather than speculation.
Before investing in designing, engineering and launching an offering, market research indicates whether the innovation aligns with consumer motivations and meets their needs better than alternatives. Watching how people engage with prototypes demonstrates appeal and reveals necessary refinements.
Armed with first-hand data on possible innovations, you can then concentrate resources around the opportunities most connected to customer priorities. Market research facilitates efficient allocation of innovation resources to focus on what customers want next – even if they don’t consciously realise it yet themselves.
Seeds Marketing Messages
Connecting authentically with customers in marketing content demands resonating with their priorities and perspectives. Unfortunately, teams often start by brainstorming around their own beliefs rather than directly engaging the audience’s worldview.
For example, social media managers at an IT firm wanted to make their posts entertaining and push the innovative aspects of new product releases. However, talking to customers revealed they simply wanted digestible content to quickly understand key product benefits and support options in case of issues.
Letting real client voices guide messaging instead of assumptions ensures content lands with the target audience. Market research provides the raw material around language customers use, opinions they have and questions they ask. These real-world insights inform impactful messaging focused on what matters most to customers.
Enlightens Decision Making
At the end of the day, the core goal of becoming more customer-centric is making better business decisions. When leaders have confidence their choices directly reflect customer input, they can drive changes across the organisation with conviction.
For example, feedback from focus groups combined with survey results may reveal customers feel overwhelmed with too many product options. That market insight justified consolidating SKUs despite facing internal resistance from sales staff wanting to push volume through expanded choice.
Every significant business decision can benefit from the unbiased perspectives provided by market research. Customer reactions test the viability of ideas and initiatives without bias and politics muddying the process. Marketing leaders can then put forward recommendations firmly anchored in meeting target audience needs rather than departmental agendas.
Bringing It All Together
With so much at stake when it comes to delivering for today’s customers, guessing is no longer good enough. Leaders must make decisions, guide innovation and create messaging grounded directly in end-user reality. This is what transforms business from simply speculating on what could appeal to customers into confidently delivering what does appeal right now.
Some key ways to put market research insights into play include:
- Share compelling market research statistics and stories with stakeholders across the organisation to align all teams around customer truths versus assumptions. Quantify the business opportunity tied to addressing customer-prioritised needs.
- Map market insights to key performance indicators. Establish clear metrics monitoring success in meeting target customer expectations and track progress toward a more customer-centric business.
- Empower customer advisory panels to provide regular feedback on proposed initiatives and concepts grounded in their needs. Develop an always-on listening capability.
- Use real quotes and examples from market research in external-facing messaging and content to resonate with customer perspectives and vocabulary.
- Build stage gates for new product development processes requiring evidence of customer demand from research before funding progresses to the next phase.
The common thread is instilling first-hand customer inputs throughout operations, guiding decisions at every level.