Marketing and selling in tough economic conditions:

Understanding customers and their behaviour

Series by : Prasanna Perera, Marketing and Management Consultant, Chartered Marketer, CIM U.K.

In the midst of the economic turmoil, many businesses may forget the importance of understanding the behaviour of their customers. After all, this is the basic principle of marketing. Let me endeavour to give you some tips on how to cost effectively understand your customers and their behaviour.

1. Observe your customers in action - Take every opportunity to observe the purchase behaviour of your customers, specially the body language. Valuable insights can be obtained, such as purchase triggers and barriers.

2. Speak to your customers whenever possible - For example in a retail outlet to get feedback on your products, pricing, packaging etc., Further to determine the extent to which your product / service meets the customer requirements.

3. Find out from customers, sources who influence their purchases of specific products / services and brands. Establish contact with influences and educate them about your products / services.

4. Find out from customers about their hobbies, interest etc., What newspapers and magazines do they read, what TV and Radio Channels do they watch / listen, what hobbies do they engage in their leisure. These insights are invaluable to understand customer behaviour and purchase patterns.

5. Conduct in-house research on an ongoing basis. A skilled in-house research team will help. Field surveys and focus group interviews will be ideal to understand customers and their behaviour.

6. When initiating external research, evaluate the potential market research agencies for both experience and costs. Cost-effective market research is the name-of-the-game, in tough market conditions. You have to get your research budget to stretch!

7. In order to keep costs low, the possibility of doing joint research on the market with suppliers, should be examined. Basically, this would be a win-win situation for both parties.

8. Interview competitor customers and judge their behaviour towards competitor brands and your brand. This comparative feedback would be useful for marketing purposes.

9. Involve loyal customers in the marketing activities of the company, such as new product development, packaging development etc., This enables the “voice” of the customer to be represented within the organization.

10. The sales and marketing team of a company, are the closest to the customers. Encourage them to obtain feedback from customers and advise the company accordingly. They should cover both customers and end-users. (consumers).

11. If a loyalty marketing program is being conducted, study and analyse customer purchase data. This will provide the organization customer related behaviour such as frequency of purchase, products / services purchased, brands purchased, payment methods etc., This is probably why many organizations are engaging in loyalty marketing programs.

Lack of budgets should not be made an excuse for not analysing customers and their behaviour. As outlined, there are many cost effective methods to obtain this information. The success of organizations in the past has been on the sound understanding of their customers and the future is no different.