Showing some love for consumers

In honor of St. Valentine’s Day, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to show your customers love, and about how to gain true “intimacy” with your customers.

Customer intimacy goes beyond simply knowing who your customers are; it involves developing a deep understanding of their needs, preferences, and behaviors. By building strong relationships with customers based on trust and empathy, brands can create a loyal customer base and drive long-term success. If you truly know your customers, you need fewer of them, because they’ll buy your products again and again and get others to buy them, too.

Qualitative research is a critical tool in developing intimacy with consumers. Human-to-human interaction is still the best way to get into your customers’ hearts and minds and understand the “why” behind the “what.” But we’ve seen a lot of “qual”(-ish) research started to be conducted by technology: ai, chatbots, survey open-ends, etc. What these methods fail at is spotting the chance to go deeper when an opportunity presents itself. These methods can’t replicate the expertise an experienced moderator brings to the table in knowing what to listen for and when and how to follow a loose thread in conversation, pulling until a new insight is uncovered. You’ve heard me say this before - the best moderators don’t follow discussion guides: we need to know what the client needs to understand at the end of the conversation, and we use the tools in our well-built toolkit to get there. Is this something Ai can replicate? Not yet. At the rate Ai is evolving, maybe very soon, but not yet.

But there’s something else that gives human moderators an edge: the ability to start analysis in our heads as we are taking in information. Only years of experience as a marketer, brand manager, advertising expert, etc. can equip one with the expertise to spot an opportunity for a brand, vet it with consumers, and bring the customer perspective to business leaders to tell a convincing opportunity story.

I’ve also said this before: anyone with social skills can develop rapport and run a focus group. While this is the most visible part of our role, the real magic - and mark of a great moderator - is the analytical skill we apply when designing the research approach, and again when considering our learnings and applying them to business opportunities. As we are conducting conversations, great moderators are already starting our analysis, developing hypotheses, testing them with consumers, pivoting, re-testing, etc. It all happens in real-time, and client observers get to come along for the ride. This is where the “intimacy” happens: listening to customers tell their stories in their own words leads to deep understanding of their challenges, emotions, pain points and desires - and, spurred by empathy, brands can more quickly innovate and design for their customers.

So if you’re looking to bring on the customer intimacy this year - remember the value of human-to-human approaches.