Customer Insight Marketing: new insights for new sales strategies

A smart company prioritizes the needs of its customers. But superficial information is not enough to gain as much knowledge about the customer as possible. Customer insight marketing is the interface between consumer interests and the potential of a brand. When used consistently, customer insight marketing gets the most out of a product — because it recognizes previously undiscovered consumer wishes and motivations and is able to predict consumer behavior with pinpoint accuracy.

Customer Insight: What makes the customer tick?

Customer insight is a special approach that focuses on a simple observation: why is a consumer interested in a particular product? This is then the basis for further questions:

• What mindsets, values and interests underlie these preferences?
• What mood are customers in when they perform certain sales-relevant actions?
• What does the customer use a product for? This may differ from the use envisioned by the salesperson.

In a nutshell, the decisive question is: what makes the customer tick? Reliable answers to these questions can help trigger consumers’ actions desired by the company with the help of certain marketing methods. And what is this particular insight? Four points are decisive here:

1. Customer insight that is new and offers added value is not obvious.
2. The insight gained must be feasible in terms of the company and must enable a suitable action.
3. The insight gained must be so compelling that the resulting action can change the customer’s behavior.
4. A win-win situation for the customer and the company must be achieved. The obvious mutual benefit creates mutual trust. And that is what strengthens the brand and/or the company.

This can be accomplished with creative, yet data-based customer insight marketing methods such as impact assessment, cross-sell analyses, customer behavior and product analysis at the point of sale or customer lifetime value determination.

What do your customers really want? Find out – via an online survey with target-group-specific survey participants from the crowd.

Advances in knowledge for competitive advantage

Many commonly held assumptions about customers turn out to be wrong at some point. Advances in knowledge about the true intentions, wishes and motivations of the target group provides clear competitive advantages. After all, a solid database is the basis for creative strategies in the sense of consistent customer insight marketing.

A new insight is a previously unused piece of information. But instrumentalizing these new insights also requires creativity. Customer insights are not just data. While numbers play an important role here, they are ultimately only the basis for conclusions drawn from surveys, market research results, analyses at the point of sale and web analytics.

Putting customer insight marketing into practice

A particularly good example of consistent customer insight marketing is the Dove Real Beauty Campaign. Instead of using perfectly proportioned models, the campaign featured “normal” women in their underwear. This strategy was based on a survey that showed that only two percent of women considered themselves “beautiful”. Dove’s response was a campaign that focused on precisely this question: What is beauty, anyway?

This strategy is consistent with all four of the above points: The insight was not obvious, it was compelling and feasible, and it lent itself to the realization of a win-win situation. As a result, Dove made a name for itself — and the brand profited from it.

Nike’s legendary Just do it campaign was also rooted in customer insights. The realization that sports are more of a chore for most people prompted Nike to combine its exclusive focus on competitive athletes with a fun factor. This strategy opened the way for Nike to profitably expand its target audience.

Customer insight marketing for the retail sector

In online marketing, the acquisition of customer data is relatively easy. Tools such as web analytics provide marketing experts with detailed data on user behavior along the customer journey, which can be used for customer insights. But retail also lends itself as an object for lucrative customer insight marketing.

For example, according to a survey by PwC Deutschland young people are also a target group for retail businesses. Almost two-thirds shop in stationary retail at least once a week. Shopping in the store around the corner is still more popular than searching for products on Amazon and Co. But the demands of Generation Z differ from those of their elders:

• 18- to 24-year-olds find it important to be able to find their way around a store quickly and easily,
• that a store supports cashless payments,
• and that it offers free Wi-Fi with an uncomplicated login procedure.

These figures might not be surprising, but no retail marketing concept aimed at this high-purchasing target group can dismiss these findings. When combined with the high environmental awareness of young consumers, lucrative strategies can be developed. This is because the young consumer group shows a significant willingness to spend more money on regional, organic and sustainably packaged products.

No customer insight marketing without data – and the clickworker crowd provides it.
Find out more about clickworker’s service “Customer Insights from the Point of Sale” now!

Summary on customer insight marketing

Data is the foundation for new insights. Customer insight marketing relies on using new knowledge in a targeted way for the benefit of a company — and this also applies to retail. The focus is always on the customer’s perception of a product. And with a little creativity, new campaigns can be developed that sustainably strengthen a brand.

Jan Knupper