Understanding Marketing and Customer behaviour
Written by Paschal Agonsi
Understanding Marketing. What’s Marketing? My favourite definition is this: Marketing is all about building and maintaining relationship with the customer.The keywords here are relationship and customer.
Having a relationship with the customer is the basics of marketing. In relationships, there must be an attraction and starting point. You’ll want to be sure you’re dealing with the right person and of course, the customer wants to be sure you’re the right person as well.
The first and foremost thing in building any relationship at all, is having a unique personality. A unique personality is having a pleasing personality that people would love to associate with. A unique personality followed by building good rapport will naturally lead to talking about business and sales.
As entrepreneurs and business people, there’s often the temptation to start selling the product first. This is almost the same as meeting someone for the first time and asking for marriage. The most polite possible response will be ‘No’ or ‘I’ll think about it’.
There must be a period of courtship where we can interact and learn more about each other and then the marriage proposal (sales) can then follow. If the Marketing is done right (courtship), saying ‘Yes I do’ will be much easier (sales).
Marketing is all about building and maintaining relationships with the customer and with social media and digital devices, we can reach more people from the comfort of your home/office.
Every post, call, chat and interaction should be about strengthening the relationship with the customer and this can only happen if we understand Customer Behaviour.
Customer Behaviour
Every customer wants more value for their money. This is the sure-fire way to predict customer behaviour. But what’s valuable to customer A, might be different from customer B.
To understand customer behaviour in a strategic way, we have to look at some basics: income, demography, needs, location etc. For the product you’re selling, you need to know the exact type of customers to target.
Customer classification
Income – low class, middle class, high class
Demography – age, gender, population, education
Needs – primary, secondary
For example, If you’re selling iPhones and you are approaching a customer, here’s the likely behaviour
Income
Low class – cant afford it
Middle class – will need a payment plan
High class – can afford it
Age
0-18 – dependent on others to provide funds
18-60 – can pay from pocket
60-150 – mostly likely dependent on others to provide funds
You can use this as a guide to analyse your product and services to predict the customer category that will have the most positive behaviour that will lead to sales.
Conclusion
In every area of business or career it is best to focus on value before sales or profit. Marketing is the act of interacting and knowing your audience/customer and how you interact with them to get their attention and make them know what you sell or do. It’s important to know your customer and set your target audience to ensure more value and profit from your product.
