We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.
Customers are your best teachers. Learning about your customer's beliefs, values, and priorities teaches you which selling points you should emphasize.
It had always made sense to me to build a business based on what people really wanted, rather than guess what we thought they might want.
Forget 'branding' and 'positioning.' Once you understand customer behavior, everything else falls into place.
When you spend time with potential customers, you get to hear about their struggles firsthand. You see their eyes light up with excitement or darken with confusion. You learn things you would never find in a survey, database, or questionnaire. You learn why people buy.
It's no fun being a salesperson when it feels like you're talking to a wall. That's what it feels like when you haven't learned your customer's points of interest.
I mean, at the simplest level, my entire background was in marketing, which largely is about understanding a customer, being able to be intuitive, being able to be empathetic.
To sell is above all to master the art and science of listening.
It's so important to experience what your customers are experiencing and listen to their suggestions.
Usually all I care about is how elegant or over-the-top the pieces are, it's nice to really get to understand what the customer wants and needs as opposed to just focusing on the aesthetic.
What the customer demands is last year's model, cheaper. To find out what the customer needs you have to understand what the customer is doing as well as he understands it. Then you build what he needs and you educate him to the fact that he needs it.
Customers don't just want to shop: they want to feel that the brand understands them.
Foremost is the principle that the purpose of consumer research is to understand the customer's needs and wishes, and thus design product and service that will provide better living for him in the future. A second principle is that no one can guess the future loss of business from a dissatisfied customer.
You can't learn anything if you are doing all the talking. Sales people should always be developing their earQ, not their IQ. The only way to create a successful sale is to understand that knowledge from listening does not become power until it is used. And ideas without action are worthless.
I'm not shy about asking the customer, because I want to talk about who she is and what she wants from me.
I think being able to sit in the shoes of a woman and being able to manage products that are mostly sold to women, alongside a lot of female employees, is really helpful because you hold that empathy to the situation. You can understand where the customer is coming from.
If you can't turn yourself into your customer, you probably shouldn't be in the ad writing business at all.
