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Five Key Ways to Get to Know Your Customer

In: Business and Management

Submitted By steelcrumpets
Words 2438
Pages 10
Five Ways to Know Your Customer Better than Your Competitor Does
Professor Julie Hennessy
What’s the challenge of Marketing Strategy? It’s not really, at its core, about advertising, though successful communications require a good marketing strategy.
Likewise, Marketing Strategy isn’t just about how to price, what features to build into your product, or how to get it to the consumer, though these are important too.
Marketing Strategy is about identifying a positioning, a clear plan for creating value for a specific and well-defined customer group. It’s about delineating a way that you will create more value for the customer you’ve chosen to serve than your competition does, because that’s how you win. Finally and importantly, it’s about creating that value for the customer in a way that creates superior value for the firm. Points of execution— communications pieces, revenue capture mechanisms, distribution partner’s incentive structures, product and service design specifications—are all both interesting and important to successful execution of a well-founded strategy. But the best execution in the world rarely helps a firm win a battle where it has no strategic advantage.
If Marketing Strategy is about locating that intersection between what customers want and where an individual firm can create value better than competition, then superior understanding of customers is crucial. Having a better sense for what would create customer value than your competitor does is a huge advantage. In fact, the goal is to have a better sense of what could create value for your chosen customer than even the customer itself.
So if superior customer insight is the goal, how do we get it? Below are 5 steps to take to get closer to that customer. These are easy things to do, so your first reaction may

be that it can’t be this easy to gain market advantage. To the

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