A deep understanding of your customer’s behavior is a competitive advantage over other market players. Today we share some insights about the strategy behind creating the perfect buyer persona for your brand.
Every customer is valuable for any business, as every customer is unique. Strategists and Marketers, especially in fashion and luxury brands, must pay attention to the client’s behavioral changes and new social attitudes.
A customer-centric business is a strategic mindset inside a company. This approach evaluates the client’s needs continuously developing personalized products and ad-hoc services. To get started, we need to know everything we can about our ideal and regular clientele.
Creating a buyer persona is a tool of the design thinking methodology process, which is a research perspective that looks into the client’s experience and inner mind. This process will help us frame our customer’s desires, buying behavior, and brand relationship.
It All Starts With Empathy: Profiling Your Customer to Create an Accurate Buyer Persona
Empathy is “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another”. A client is a treasure; a relationship between a brand and its customers should be based on common needs and motivations. Understanding and sharing the same dreams will allow us to place them at the center of the brand.
In design thinking, an empathy map is a tool that will allow us to trace – by quadrants- certain areas of concern of our customer; this step is fundamental to create a buyer persona. The more information we can gather from them, the more accurate our mapping will be.
This management tool will help marketing and brand managers to understand what the client “really” wants in a product or service. The map can be used for creative problem solving, and also for detecting factors that will drive client satisfaction.
We can develop as many empathy maps as we want or need to collect the correct data to profile our customers. Single one-to-one empathy maps or focused groups to develop the mapping are recommended. However, the methodology is flexible and adaptable for any case scenario or any business particularities.
The Four Research Areas to Create an Empathy Map
Before creating an empathy map, we need to decide its purpose as it is a qualitative research methodology. The main goal could be to gather more information regarding the type of market segment, a product test, a brand’s processes, or a specific business route or course of action. Having a clear objective will help us to formulate the right questions to get the best insights.
- Think & Feel: This area will help us to understand what the customer thinks in a broad sense, to enter their mind, and empathize. Ask them what they care about, what they do not care about, What moves them, what worries them, what their dreams and aspirations are. Dig into their core feelings, inner conflicts, and hopes.
- Say & Do: This area will help us to understand what the customer says and does regarding the process you are researching. What do they do and why? What is their behavior in public or online? What does the customer say in those environments? You will need to find a reason for their behavior and why they say that. It is relevant to measure the degree of influence through its spoken or written words.
- See & Hear: This area will help us understand what the customer sees and hears in their context or social environment. You will have to map their interactions; The questions to focus on are: What issues or problems are they seeing? What offer suits their desires? What market alternatives are they reviewing? What do they hear from family, partners, workgroups? We should measure the customer’s receptivity in listening to those main influences.
- Pains & Gains: This area will help us understand the main pain points of the customer and their main achievements. You will need to find the client’s main goals are, what success means to that person, or what it wants to conquer. Also, it is the opposite. what makes them feel uncomfortable, what their main frustrations, doubts, and fears are.
Once the research has been carried out, select the insights and mix it with your previous market segmentation data, such as age, gender, income, level of education, and work. Fill your buyer persona framework with comprehensive information about your customer, their buying behavior to have the “real picture” of your ideal client.
This tool will help you to develop ultra-personalized strategies for your customer’s satisfaction and improve your brand’s engagement. Remember, understanding your client’s goals is a way to build loyalty and to be a truly customer-centric brand.