Knowing Your Target Market

I had a devastating encounter on Friday. I was at a corporate event and one of the individuals there made a couple discriminatory remarks and told inappropriate stories about women. He was, at the same time, courting my business. Of course, his behaviour completely turned me off and he lost an potential business from me. If he lacked social judgment how could I trust him to manage my business with thoughtful intelligence? He made quite an impression and has severely hurt his brand in my eyes.

We all know that a brand is owned by a customer, not the corporation. A brand is the manifestation of all the multiple experiences a customer has with your organization. It's a wide spectrum that affects a brand, some of which can be controlled and some things that can not.

Here are a few things business learnings that I take away from the situation:

1. Your customers are living in "today", which is almost "tomorrow". Ensure that your policies, procedures, marketing, customer service, products, services and all portion of your value chain reflect today's reality and start evolving them for tomorrow.

2. Required IQ + EQ. An organization needs to be both brainy intelligent but also emotionally intelligent. You need to intimately know your customer. What hits their emotional buttons, both good and bad. Often it is the EQ that means more than the IQ. If you treat them with respect and interact with them on a genuine caring level they will start to trust and value you.

3. What is appropriate for one audience is not always appropriate for another audience. Be aware of your messaging, your product offers, your marketing vehicles... Does it reach and speak to the people who your are targeting. The phone companies have recognized that they needed to launch a brand targeted to youth because their existing brand didn't have much street cred (e.g. Telus has recently launched Koodo, similarly to how Bell (Fido) and Rogers (Solo) have youth brands.)

What other things do you take away from this situation?

What can social media sites do for my organization?

I'm sure many of you are on Twitter, Plurk and other conversational social media sites. This dialogue is nice and all, but what does it mean for branding, marketing and public relations? Well, it is incredibly important because individuals wield the power to sway, convey and share anything, and everything, they want. There was an old marketing saying that said 'for every positive experience a person has they tell two people but for every negative experience a person has they tell 7 people'. This helped to direct companies to do what was in the best interest of the customer. From here flowed the concept of being consumer centric or consumer focused. Today, with the help of social marketing sites, people can share their opinions and experiences in an instant, and to multiple people around the world, who may then share it multiple times again. It is powerful.

So, what is your company doing to be proactive with their online marketing strategy? Are you listening to your customers? Do you know who your customers are? Do you know how to find them? How often are you having conversations with your best customers? Can you quickly identify a customer who has voiced a concern online and address it immediately before it spirals through viral communications? What sort of value or savings comes from having satisfied customers who feel engaged and appreciated?

Ok, so there are a lot of questions to consider. I'll try to address these over the next month. Maybe give you the rationale and motivation to make the leap to 2008... and shift your organization's thinking about engaging customers.