When you observe the behavior of people in their environment, you can learn a great deal about how you can help them.
Human behavior has been and will always be the essence of marketing. Your customers have challenges, aspirations, and unique ways of responding to situations. If you can observe them in their native environment, you will learn the most. If you can compliment that with what you learn from the social networks, you will further enhance your understanding of how you can help them with practical solutions.
Yesterday I volunteered to work at my son's senior class celebration. This was a function held on the high school campus. So, for the most part, you could say I was observing students in their native environment.
This event featured a variety of fun challenges that included the Monster Wall Climb and the Money Cube. It was an enlightening experience. As a marketer, I have trained myself to observe and discern lessons that I can apply to my work. I encourage you to do the same with your customers or future customers in their native environment, because the information you gain will probably change, and in some cases, reinforce what you have already suspected to be true. Here's what I learned.
Respect
All of these students were respectful of each other. While they were interested in succeeding in the games at this celebration, they were very supportive of the success of their peers.
The Lesson: Share that small success with one customer with all of your customers. You will probably discover that they are more than willing to allow you to use that experience to help you help others. This is where testimonials and case studies can prove to be especially valuable for helping your market to understand how your products and services work to achieve viable solutions.
Competition
Notwithstanding what I have just written, these students were indeed also very competitive. They wanted to do well, and they were always looking for the edge. And for the most part, they were willing to bend the rules as far as was permissible – and sometimes a bit more. Indeed, this is no doubt due to what our society teaches them.
The Lesson: Your customers want your best effort. They take pride in winning, which means they enjoy exceptional solutions to their problems. Whether your talent is providing exceptional customer service or a quality product, you should be focused on using that to help your customers feel like winners when the work with you.
Differences
While I was working the Money Cube – which is essentially a telephone booth with a fan piping air into it to circulate real and fake paper currency, I noticed the students all approached the game differently. Some thrashed wildly, some took a strategic approach of only grabbing the real money, and others calmly went about their business to take in all that they could. And the net result was they all walked away with approximately the same amount of spendable cash.
The Lesson: There are always differences in working with people. This is why it is important to have a flexible process that focuses your business operations. You can use it to adapt to individual needs and still achieve the similar results that they are all looking for.
Human Behavior
I have been fascinated by human behavior for as long as I have been studying and practicing marketing. It is easy to stand back and see differences, but without exception, your customers share more in common than you may realize.
It is a valuable practice to observe, study, contrast, and most importantly, assimilate.
Look for what the consumers in your markets have in common and you will be a better marketer.
To go a step further, take this and use it to find solutions to problems that you and your competitors have not yet identified. That should be easy to do in this economy, because these days we are all faced with new challenges.
If you need an idea to get started learning about your markets, you can start right now by monitoring your brand, and then going deeper into the human behavior that is associated with it.
A helpful tool that I just discovered for real-time search that you can use to augment your results Google searches is Collecta. This real time search engine indexes Twitter posts and other real-time information that may take months to get indexed on Google.
Looking for more?
Talk to your customers.
And never stop observing them in their native environment.
Look for more ideas on this in the coming week when I post the 3rd of a four-part series on Content Marketing.
Photo Credit: AmericanArtMuseum
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