Attracting the Customer You Want

First of all, there really isn’t a wrong customer. Any customer that buys your product or service with the right intention and can afford to pay for it is bound to be a good customer. However, your image might be turning away the customers you really want in order to grow past your current level.

Maybe your current market is dwindling? Maybe you are getting people without the disposable income to be either upgraded to other products over time, or that can’t afford to buy as often as you would like. Maybe you are just trying to attract a type of customer that will increase the prestige of your brand. Whatever the reason is, Re-Branding yourself is not going to be a quick fix, to attract a new kind of customer, you have to consider what it is that you have been doing in the past that hasn’t attracted them to begin with.

Step by Step

Re-Branding from one target to another is hard to do if you try to take it all on in one step. When making major changes, you risk alienating your current bread and butter long before you manage to get any traction in your new market segment. The best way to re-brand is to stage your image changes so that you slowly move towards your desired target, not assuming that you can just change everything at once.

You are fighting a battle on several fronts when you re-brand. Your current customers are not communicating to your new target, word of mouth marketing is in other words not really present to help you. If your desired target is distinctly separate from the old one, the gap will be too big to step in one go. You need to stage a brand image transfer through the segments that bridge the two. Trying to make a massive target change immediately will alienate your current bread and butter before you have achieved traction in your new segment.

First you have to identify the patterns of your current customer group and the pattern of the wanted group. Then determine the overlapping segments that link the two together, in order to maintain your profitability in the segment change you have to step through the changes, attracting the intermediate segments as you move along the chain. Overstep these intermediate boundaries at your own peril. Chances are you’ll need a very big wallet to see you through the aftermath of failing in two segments at once.

A simple example of this would be to change segments to one with a higher income. If your current customer has an average household income of $40K and you are interested in the $100k+ market, you need to find the 60 and 80k markets first. They will help you gradually make the transition to be able to handle the segment you really want.

This will also help you adjust and cater to the changing expectations of the new segments, which makes your control and modifications smaller and more manageable. If you allow your staged efforts to help predict the next step, chances of success increase dramatically.

Product Control and Development

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that your product is ready to receive your new segment as is. Most likely, there is a disconnect between the image you think you are projecting and the perception the customer has. This disconnect has to be addressed from the bottom up, taking care of the real problems before you can keep the segment you want to attract.

Re-Branding requires that you approach the new segment with care, listening intensively to their feedback and making corrections as soon as you discover the problems they are reporting. These corrections will be the base of return business, and return business is what can build you in your new segment.

Product Control here requires you to have research functions in place to measure the response from the segments as you move through them. Customer satisfaction surveys are great, but if you don’t know who answered them, you don’t know if you are hitting a new segment right or not. Focus groups, interviews etc. are much more accurate and can deliver the metrics you want.

If you don’t capture the feedback early, you end up growing into a segment you don’t understand, and you will see the same problem as originally - not catering to the expectations of your desired segment.

Advertising too Soon

The most common mistake here is to just rely on Advertising to attract the segment you want. If you are not attracting the right segment, your marketing channels could be part of the issue, but the problem would be better addressed in seeing why your desired segment isn’t biting instead of assuming that they just don’t know about you.

Advertising means making a promise, that promise will be successful when it matches a specific segments expectation. If you are not prepared to deliver to those expectations, you will probably hurt your positioning in this segment before long. Before you advertise on a broad scale, you need to know that the issues keeping your desired segment away in the past have been addressed. Otherwise you will cause an immediate backlash when they have their original pre-conceived notions affirmed.

Again, you will hurt your efforts to re-brand if you assume that the segment you want is just obtuse and uninformed. Chances are that they are choosing another solution because of some more profound disconnect between your product, and their expectations.

They are waiting for you

Your desired segment is out there, and just like any other market, it is waiting for someone to deliver what they want. As long as you are prepared to listen, adjust, and deliver on your promises. There is no market segment that is out of your reach. But get there one step at a time, with deliberate care to be what you claim to be and with a keen ear on the customers pulse.

Never assume that the customer was wrong in not choosing you to begin with, their business was and always will be yours to lose. You can reach them when you become what they want you to be.