Customer needs are complex and constantly evolving. Rapid technological advancements, changing lifestyle patterns, and external economic pressures are just some factors that can affect them.
Building a successful brand means consistently matching your Value Proposition to customer needs. Designing your Value Proposition isn’t a once-off task reserved purely for the start-up phase in business. You should regularly assess if your customer needs have changed and then alter things accordingly. Failure to do this can result in your brand losing market share to the competition or becoming irrelevant in the customer’s decision-making process.
At The Pulse Rooms, we invest time in helping businesses define customer needs before building their Value Proposition.
Here are three things to consider when identifying your customer needs.
Know The Job To Be Done
American academic, Clayton Christensen, came up with a simple definition for customer needs. He referred to customers as having a series of ‘jobs to be done’. In this day and age, we lead increasingly busy lives. We constantly try to tick multiple things off the to-do list and sometimes run into trouble. This is often when we actively seek a product or service to help in the process.
Start by listing all the ‘jobs’ your customers need to do, and identify where your brand’s offering can help them overcome any hurdles. Think about the conscious and subconscious choices people make to use your product or service to reach their goal.
Talk To Your Customers
Gathering insights around a table and making assumptions about your customers needs is a great starting point. But, the only people who can honestly tell you about these jobs are customers themselves. Talking directly to your customers will help to uncover things you hadn’t even considered. This doesn’t always have to involve a formal process, such as running a customer survey. Anecdotal comments can be just as insightful.
A useful tool to apply is the customer journey map. With your customer, identify the different phases in their journey and their most immediate needs at each point. Doing this with multiple customers will start to unearth particular patterns.
Find The Basic Needs
Once you have a clear trend, it’s time to delve deeper. Try to pick out those needs most of your customers have no choice but to deal with. These are known as ‘basic needs’. The ones that cost them time and money, and cause the greatest amount of frustration. Ultimately, you want to tell customers how your brand directly meets those needs through your Value Proposition.
