HOW ARE YOU TRAINING YOUR CUSTOMERS?

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HOW ARE YOU TRAINING YOUR CUSTOMERS?

June 18th, 2008

As a marketer, you have a tremendous opportunity to school your customer on the value proposition on your terms. All too often, however, marketers defer that responsibility to the category leader, and engage the customer on the market leader’s terms, not their own. This is not to dismiss the impact of share-of-voice on the marketplace; however, blindly following the lead of the market leader is at best no better than “me, too” marketing. How on earth can you expect customers to establish an emotional connection with you if the best you can offer them is slightly better version of what they’ll find elsewhere?

The classic examples of this are the categories that are perceived as “price driven.” The prevailing attitude of marketers in these categories seems to be “the only thing that motivates people to buy is the lowest price.” The assumption is that, all things being equal, the customer will go for the lowest price. In reality, rarely are all other things equal. Customer service, selection, availability, delivery time, warranty, quality, customer feedback. The customer’s overall experience–these are all things that are important to a large percentage of customers, yet in some categories they are rarely ever dealt with, primarily because the market leader (or in some cases that bugaboo known as “tradition”) determines its not important.

Operating with this mindset, and with the cooperation of every other player in the market, the category “trains” customers to only look for the lowest price (or whatever single point the market leader defines as important). No one bothers to talk to the customer about any other reason to do business with the company. And because the entirety of the conversation with the customer is single-issue focused, the customer doesn’t know any better than to go for the lowest price. If there’s only one voice in the wilderness, guess who people are going to listen to?

Under this scenario, the opportunity to gain customer loyalty is minimal. The category becomes commoditized. Every option is the same, thinks the customer, so I might as well go with the lowest price. For the marketer, this means that every time that customer re-enters the marketplace, you need to fight for him/her all over again. Maybe that customer will come to you first, but only for the opportunity to give him/her the lowest price; if a competitor comes in a penny or two cheaper, all bets are off.

You can see how the cost of customer acquisition gets thrown out of whack, as does profit potential you have to give away to entice the sale. What are the alternatives? The obvious place to start is to find out what’s really important to your customer.

Rather than relying on tradition or the category leader to define “value,” find out how your customers define it. Then demonstrate to them how you do a better job than anyone else of delivering it. Could be that you may “retrain” customers to think about what the category means to them and how to shop it.