Think Like A Consumer For Successful Marketing
By Ed Keller, professor of marketing, City University of New York

In “A River Runs through It” Brad Pitt’s character tells his brother, “All I need is two more years and I’ll be able to think like a fish.” He was responding to being told he’s becoming a fine fisherman by his father.

Metaphorically, that’s what it takes to be successful in marketing, too. You don’t have to think like a fish; but if you can think like a consumer, you will be successful. Here are some tips that may help you to move in that direction.

• Find out what the consumer is thinking. The success of your business isn’t about developing strategies that are based on your beliefs. To achieve your goals, you need to tune in to what your customer is thinking. While this sounds logical, the fact is that many marketing programs fail because the underlying rationale did not truly address this key direction—that is, the businessman built his or her marketing plan around what they believed, instead of what the data said.
  
  To avoid this problem, don’t be afraid of doing market research, be it be qualitative (e.g. focus groups) or quantitative (e.g. surveys). You may think that this is expensive and time consuming. But with the Internet, it can be accomplished in a little time and less cost. When you really understand what is driving your customer, you’ll find the results are positive.

• Don’t bias your research. Don’t ask “loaded” questions--questions that generate an answer you want. This has been known to happen. One pharmaceutical company I worked with completely changed their creative strategy, simply because they got the answers that they wanted. After they lost significant market share, they re-looked at the survey questions only to realize that the questions got in the way of getting answers that reflected how the customer felt. Make sure your questions generate unbiased answers.



• Marketing Research is not a panacea. Marketing is a valuable tool that when used correctly will enable you to get into the consumer psyche, but it shouldn’t be used in a vacuum. It’s essential to understand that it provides a snapshot of behavior at a given time. But consumer behavior is always changing, and responding to changes in the market environment.

Follow Your Instincts

There’s nothing like being scientific and applying those principles to better understand market behavior. Remember, though, that this is marketing and not science. And even if it was a science, I would recommend that you heed the words of Albert Einstein who said, “The only really valuable thing is intuition.” If you can trust that, then your understanding of the human psyche will truly be enhanced and your business will be on the road to success.