Do you know who your buyers are?

Before you can really think about devel­op­ing a rela­tion­ship it might be a good idea to think seri­ously about who it is you want to relate to!! Remem­ber when you were dat­ing you prob­a­bly didn’t say “I just want a man/woman” that is a pretty big pot to fish in. You most likely had some vision of who a poten­tial date and even­tu­ally part­ner might be, so you may have made a list:

No nose picking

No spit­ting

Yes good looks

Yes likes the outdoors

Yes likes dogs

No doesn’t like hamsters

Eats with utensils

Old School v. New School

You get the idea…the same is true for folks you would like to become your best all time buy­ers. The old school way of doing this was to see these folks as “tar­gets” to put labels on them and then treat every­body under a cer­tain label the same. These “tar­gets” found and ana­lyzed in truly dehu­man­iz­ing sci­en­tific ways.

Things are dif­fer­ent now. Now you need to get to know who would be most likely to be a sup­port­ive, repeat word of mouth buyer/customer/promoter. You need to get all deep and really describe that per­son in terms that fit.

Before we start our pro­fil­ing thing, you need to under­stand that your buy­ers have prob­lems and they look to you for solu­tions. Now this is prob­a­bly some­thing you never imag­ined… I mean, what kind of prob­lems would peo­ple have that buy­ing your stuff could fix? Well, think about what you intended for your stuff when you made it. Was it whim­si­cal? How about col­or­ful? Could peo­ple wear it and what was it sup­posed to do when they put it on? Or, maybe they want some­thing cheery to brighten up a dreary cor­ner. These are all prob­lems poten­tial buy­ers have as they dis­cover your stuff.

OK… the other thing this pro­file process is designed to do is to elim­i­nate those grouchy,crabby, nick-knack, flea mar­kety types who you want to bitch slap when they ask if “made all this stuff your­self?” Focus­ing on who you really want to invite into your spe­cial cir­cle will pretty much inoc­u­late you from hav­ing to deal with folks who just don’t work for you and in the process save you  a whole lot of grief, energy and time.

Two things…

There are basi­cally two things to con­sider in this process the first is the observ­able touch­able, describ­able things that mostly describe these folks. Like income, fam­ily size,married/unmarried,gender,age etc. These are the hard stats called demo­graph­ics you can get from cen­sus info or any other col­lec­tion of peo­ple related sta­tis­tics. These help you get into the ball­park or may within a cou­ple of blocks.

The next thing is not so obvi­ous because it is all about how the group you are look­ing at  see’s them­selves. Like “dri­ves a BMW” or “rides a bike” ” is a hope­less roman­tic” ” is green”. While plenty of peo­ple drive BMWs or ride bikes it is the under­ly­ing inten­tion that their behav­ior is based on that counts. So the guy who bikes to work every­day reli­giously because he doesn’t want to pol­lute has a dif­fer­ent moti­va­tion than the one who does it for fit­ness. Like­wise the BMW owner may be in love with the pre­ci­sion of “ger­man engi­neer­ing” and see her car as a work of art while her friend my see it as a rank indi­ca­tor. These fac­tors are known as Psychographics.

Case Study

There are two out­door ori­ented stores here in the Twin Cities, REI and Mid­west Moun­taineer­ing, one is cor­po­rate big box type the other is locally owned and oper­ated since the ‘70s. While the both attract out door ori­ented peo­ple they each attract dif­fer­ent cus­tomers all together. REI is focused on more con­sumer, casual out­door folks while Mid­west Moun­taineer­ing attracts the the more hard core climbers, kayak­ers, hik­ers and campers. Peo­ple who are look­ing for knowl­edge­able staff who can help them select the best gear gen­er­ally go to Mid­west Moun­taineer­ing, those who are not so con­cerned about such things go to REI. The dif­fer­ence between the two is found lies mostly in the psy­cho­graphic fac­tors and not the demo­graphic which is rel­a­tively the same.

Mid­west Moun­taineer­ing does lit­tle adver­tis­ing so it draws it’s cus­tomers by word of mouth and it’s rep­u­ta­tion of hav­ing an expert staff. It started out of the garage of the owner who sold climb­ing gear in the ‘60s and early ‘70s so it has a strong and loyal fol­low­ing. While REI started sim­i­larly in Seat­tle it has evolved its’ focus to be more con­sumer ori­ented with a touch of price point attrac­tion by way of its’ mem­ber­ship rebates. Mid­west Moun­taineer­ing often sells the same gear but at higher price and it spe­cial­izes in pre­mium brand gear.

While there is some cross over it is not sig­nif­i­cant, both brands have a loyal base. So you can see while both pull from the same demo­graphic their psy­cho­graphic pro­file is pretty much oppo­site of the other. The point here is to think about the psy­cho­graphic ele­ment at this time because it will likely be one of the key dif­fer­en­tia­tors that make the dif­fer­ence between a loyal fol­low­ing and a not so loyal one.

The whole point of this pro­file thing is to come up with an iden­tity, a “name” for that per­son who feels like you have known for­ever and who as a result buys your stuff and gets other like minded folks to buy it as well. When you “name” this pro­file you and she will rec­og­nize each other above the din off com­pet­i­tive noise and maybe run head­long into each oth­ers arms for ever and ever…well maybe not like that but you never know. I call these folks “get yours” because the really get you and iden­tify with what bring to the world.

Finally, another way to look at build­ing this pro­file is to use your­self and your val­ues as fil­ters. Think about what is impor­tant to you when you go out into the mar­ket look­ing for some­thing, what fac­tors mat­ter when you are try­ing to make up your mind. Is it knowl­edge, is it that they look rep­utable, is it that they rec­og­nize you and seem to know what you are look­ing for?

Now go ahead and pro­file away…