Tips and Advice for Businesses to Look at Their Products and Branding from a Consumer's Perspective.
"Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?" How you look might seem like a vanity metric, but when applied to business, keeping up appearances is a vital strategy. Seeing your products and branding through the eyes of your consumer is crucial to understanding how your business is perceived and how it might improve.
So as a business owner (or perhaps as someone creating a new brand ready to enter the market) what can you do to make sure you make better, conscious decisions?
Stepping into Your Customer's Shoes
1. Customer Journey Mapping:
Create detailed maps of the customer journey to identify pain points and areas for improvement. This exercise can reveal insights into the usability of your website, the effectiveness of your customer service, and the overall satisfaction with your product range. Even small incremental improvements of your customers journey over time can produce really positive results to your business.
Ask yourself at each stage of the journey – what is working and what is not. How do I fix what is broken and improve what people already like.
2. Empathy Interviews and Focus Groups:
Engaging directly with your target audience through interviews and focus groups can provide a deeper understanding of their needs, desires, and frustrations. This feedback is gold dust for tailoring your products and communications to better meet their expectations. Don’t be tempted to use leading questions to get the answers you “want”. Better still engage with a 3rd party to undertake research about your brand and some of your competition to get even more valuable insights that you could possibly achieve on your own.
3. Usability Testing:
Regularly testing your products and website’s user interface and user experience with real users can provide you with direct insights into how accessible and enjoyable your digital platforms and physical products are. The best method to do this is to user input from people who are not familiar with your product or service, because they will identify issues and improvements that you may have already subconsciously resolved as a user, but not in the product.
Familiarity bias can cause a business to ignore flaws because they know how to “work around” a potential glitch or nuance in a product. Someone who has never used something will provide a much more realistic feedback model which represents a new customers reflection. Similarly brand loyalty can diffuse and camouflage flaws so be careful to ensure that testing and feedback is balanced.
4. Social Listening:
Utilize social media tools to monitor what customers are saying about your brand online. This real-time feedback can provide immediate insights into public perception and highlight areas needing swift action. Look for trends in what people are saying, use them to identify improvement and most importantly provide feedback and responses, even to the most negative of comments. Brands that listen to their audiences and interact with them have far more success than those who blindly talk at customers and deliver products developed blindly in a windowless bunker.
The Power of Perspective.
Seeing your business from the outside can transform your approach to marketing, product design, and customer service. It encourages continuous improvement and helps cultivate a customer-centric culture within your company.
When undertaking research and development make sure to be conscious of internal bias. Not every business needs to radically change the way they do things to reap the benefits of customer focused feedback. Sometimes using a consultant to simply validate or challenge design briefs or proposed branding evolution can help ensure that your results have more power, meaning and sustainability.
Reflecting on your brand through the eyes of those who interact with it allows for a kind of introspective assessment that is indispensable in today's competitive market. This approach not only helps in adjusting strategies but also in forging stronger connections with your customers.
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