The customer knows, we can only guess
How often do you assume you know what your customers think about your product or service? Before starting Oomiji, I worked with C-Suite execs on their marketing challenges. I would always ask the same two questions: “What do your customers think of your company or product?” and after their answer, “How do you know?” Other than a conversation here or there, few had ever engaged their customers in a real exchange about their company. My job was to go out and see if they were right about their assumptions. The answer, without exception, was “Never!”
It makes sense. Company managers are immersed in their own challenges and they see their company through a different lens. There was never a case where I went back to a CEO or CMO and told them they were exactly right. They weren’t dumb or being presumptuous. In fact, they were always very smart and accomplished people. There were just too many filters for them to see through to get to the truth.
The New York Times has been running a series called Mark Makers and I saved the one below because it tells the story of how senior execs see themselves and their companies in a compelling way.
If understanding customers is the key to success, a platform that can ask customers questions and build their answers into every file should be pretty valuable because it can tell you how to talk to each of your customers about what they want to hear. That’s what one-to- one marketing at scale is. The term has been misused lately because hundreds of marketing platforms are using it but what they’re doing is taking data that requires assumptions, like past purchases, geo location, and algorithmic profiles and projecting consumer behavior. It’s not much more successful than the “batch an blast” approach that has brought us 350 billion daily emails around the world and it’s certainly not listening to customers.
We built a platform that enables marketers to listen to every customer that wants to talk to them and then use that information to market back to the customer in a customized way. Do all customers want to talk to the companies they buy from? No, but many do and those tend to be either your best customers or the ones who want you to fix a problem and could become great customers. As described in the article below, your customers are “like having access to a brilliant brain trust. All you have to do is listen.”
The technology stuff, AI facilitated analytics, segmentation, feature integration are all there and that’s what so many platforms are selling but that’s just stuff that helps you understand and have a relevant conversation with your customers. The reknowned Harvard professor Theodore Leavitt was known to say, ““People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!” The challenge of selling the drill is the same for all products. The answer is finding which hole they want to make and that simply requires asking.
I’d love to talk to you about your quarter-inch hole and what’s needed to fill it. Contact me at jon@oomiji.com
