How Well do You Know Your Audience?

This article originally appeared in the Editorial Advantage newsletter.

A sizeable chunk of the writing done in Washington is intended to persuade. If your job is to win hearts and minds for a nonprofit organization or government agency, you can learn a lot from leading thinkers in business marketing. Their top priority is knowing customers better than they know themselves.

Yes, it’s basic. Yet, too often purveyors of ideas and their audiences see the world through completely different eyes. They might as well be on different planets.

Conventional marketing research, such as focus groups and survey research, fill in some of the gaps. But a newer, more comprehensive approach is taking hold, embracing the whole customer.

“(C)onsumers do not live their lives in the silo-like ways by which universities and businesses organize themselves,” writes Gerald Zaltman in How Customers Think (Harvard Business School Press, 2003). “Rather, the mind, brain, body, and external world all shape one another in fluid, dynamic ways.”

In other words, to know your audience means knowing – in your bones – how they feel about what you’re selling, whether it’s laptop computers, a worthy cause, or a healthier diet.

Seeing the customer as an integrated being, rather than a decision-making machine, takes marketers into the realm of the unconscious, where memories and visual imagery prevail. It is new territory for many, but well worth the trip.

Familiarity Breeds Success

Consider this: For every 100 people exposed to a message, only a fraction will take notice, only a fraction of those will later recall the message and even fewer will have a favorable attitude. Only a fraction of those will act on the message and try the product, vote for the candidate, or use the stairs instead of the elevator.

Assume that you lose two-thirds of your readership at each stage in the process. Among the 100 people you started with, you’ve persuaded 1 person. If you could make your message more memorable, so that one-half later recall it – up from one-third – you end up persuading 2 people. If, in addition, you instill a favorable attitude in one-half – again, up from one-third – you’ve now got 3 people in your camp. You’ve tripled your success rate.

With audiences in the hundreds of thousands, marketing campaigns pay for themselves with just a few percentage points’ improvement in recall and attitude.

How to Get Closer to Your Customer

So, how do you unlock the secrets of the reader/customer’s heart? A new-wave marketer might start with the following – based on Zaltman and also on “Hitting the Sweet Spot,” by Lisa Fortini-Campbell (The Copy Workshop, 1992):

• Observe them engaging in the behavior you want to influence. Fortini-Campbell refers to this as ethnography; in consumer marketing, it is watching people use a product or service. In social marketing, it might be spending a day “disguised” as an office worker to observe people interacting with your client organization.
• Talk to people who regularly see your customers doing what interests you. If you’re trying to sell beer, says Fortini-Campbell, chat with bartenders. If you’re running a membership campaign, talk to your most successful recruiters.
• Ask open-ended questions about the decision process. Why are people behaving the way they are, and how do they feel about possibly doing things in a different way?
• Listen to what they tell you. Make it easy for them to say things you (or your client) don’t necessarily want to hear. Recognize that you (or your client) and your customer may think about things – the product, service, or issue – in very different ways.
• Look for an insight that links what you are selling with what your customer wants to buy. “In case after case,” says Fortini-Campbell, “the richest level of communication comes from combining a rational brand benefit with an emotional need.”

While a new wind may be blowing, old-fashioned number crunching still has its place. Successful marketers’ insights generally arise from a masterful command of customer data, as well as direct observation and intuition. The most successful writers and editors are those who probe for those insights as well.

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