What Type of Customer Are You?
As David Ogilvy said, “The customer isn’t stupid. She’s your wife.” Or your neighbor, brother, friend. Or your neighbor’s brother’s friend.
If you have been lulled into thinking of customers as target markets, it may be a good time to remember that each customer makes an individual decision to buy, just like you do.
Even if you are part of a company team making a group decision, you still filter the buying decision through your own personal criteria, a process that you rely on and that has worked for you in the past.
Two of the four parts of your customer’s psychological type are concerned with gathering data and making decisions. What if you knew this about your customers?
What if you knew just one more piece of information about your customer: that your customer gathers data by looking at patterns of data versus individual data points?
Say, for example, software developers, who tend to be intuitive and relational when analyzing data. Would you continue to just list features on your data sheet or change it to show how combinations of features can yield specific results? You could add market data showing trends in development, or changing demand for features.
How you present information should be based on how your customer takes it in.
What type of customer are you? Here is a link to a very brief, quick self-assessment of your type. Pay attention to the letters for each answer: ENTP or ISTJ or ESTP. You can continue on for an accurate summary of your type, if you so desire.
Through the process of the self-assessment, you should be able to see how all of the companies marketing to you should adjust their marketing to have it make more sense to you. To stop emotional appeals if you make decisions based on hard data. To add big picture benefits if you are intuitive. To stop yelling at you if you like to think quietly. To make their marketing more like you.
That is my message this year: Make your marketing more like your customer. Because you can’t make your customer more like your marketing.
