The Customer Owns
The Company®
So Let Them Run It
Once you turn your company over to your customer it becomes inexorably
simpler to run things. Lucky for us, the customer never takes a day off.
Equally, they can also hire and fire you at will...many times without notice.
They are both gentle and brutal. Loving and loathing. Helpful and hurtful.
It's akin to a marriage, friendship or communion. It takes good listening skills
and even better reactions to keep those relationships thriving and happy over
time.
The Customer Owns The Company® is more than just a compelling headline.
It's a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly dialogue with your customer that helps them guide your decisions. And, whether you're an investor, manufacturer, distributor or retailer they're talking about you. We believe it's best if you listen intently and respond ably.
The Customer Owns The Company® is a proprietary marketing research approach that gets to the head and heart of your customer. Combining both qualitative and quantitative methodology it provides specific direction for your everyday efforts to serve the needs and wants of your customer. Think of it as a daily focus group that happens in every household in which you have customers. Every transaction, every mention, every web search and every visit to a store holds the opportunity to discover what you're doing well, and what you can do better.
The Customer Owns The Company® looks for one thing: the gold. What we're mining for are the key differentiators that make you necessary for your customer and sets you apart from your competitors. The gold is what makes you unsubstitutable. And, as your customer evolves through their own life stages you should be fine tuning, rediscovering and constantly evolving to keep up with them.
7-Step Method
To mine the brand's gold and develop consumer-focused strategies for sales, marketing, finance, new product development, pricing, capital raises, social media campaigns, promotional themes and packaging we go through 7 steps:
1. Conduct a brand audit
Here we look at the data that we already have access to, using it to familiarize ourselves with the brand, its products, and their unique attributes as compared to competitive offerings.
2. Form a brand hypothesis
Using our audit as the backdrop we form hypotheses to test with consumers so that we can unlock the gold that’s inherent to the brand.
3. Field consumer research
We ask consumers about the importance of various attributes and their satisfaction with those same attributes to identify distinct opportunities for the brand. Most importantly, we allow them to tell us in their own voice their feelings, frustrations, expectations, hopes, and aspirations. This is where we mine the gold.
4. Share and collaborate with designers
Using our research results we develop the design brief that guides the creative development whether in financial modeling, pricing, new product development, packaging or customer experiences.
5. Develop new branding concepts
Through a collaborative process, we create new concepts that meet both the importance and satisfaction requirements stated by our consumers so that we can harvest the opportunities. And, we use their words to craft our own.
6. Test new concepts
We return to a matched panel of consumers to test if we’ve captured all the opportunities.
7. Finalize refinements and roll-out
We tweak our designs to fully leverage the brand opportunities, then roll it out. Always staying agile.