Insights Into Consumers and Competitors

• How do I identify my customer?
• What is the profile of my consumers?
• Do my products appeal to more than one consumer segment? Which ones?

Understanding the customer is fundamental to marketing. Our experts routinely develop consumer profile studies and often couple them with segmentation studies in order to deliver deeper understanding and insight into your consumers. In our experience, you rarely find a consumer with singular needs. Most brands and products appeal to a variety of people by addressing a multiple needs. In conducting segmentation studies we nearly always find pockets of consumers whose needs are not satisfied and who represent opportunities for new products.

• Are my customers happy with my products or services?
• Can we do a better job of servicing our customers?

The answer to both of these questions is “it is vital to understand your current position, but just as vital to continually improve”. Customer satisfaction is a moving target because expectations are always changing. Competitors up the ante every day, especially in technically-forward categories. We help clients establish customer satisfaction monitoring mechanisms that enable the continuous tracking of performance and satisfaction. Such mechanisms bring many other benefits, but the most important benefit is the opening of a line of communication that tells the customer they matter.

• What is important to consumers when they buy the kind of products I sell?
• How often do consumers use the kind of products I sell?
• Who are the most important competitors in my markets?

If you have no competitors, understanding your customer and how they relate to your products would be enough. But few product categories enjoy the luxury of no competition. Understanding markets and the role of competitors is an important piece of the marketing puzzle. We often use Attitude, Awareness and Usage Studies to define markets and identify the space that each brand occupies in them. Such studies yield a wealth of information about consumer habits and are often combined with Segmentation Studies for a comprehensive understanding of the marketplace.