Personal preferences

Often when I’m talking to a client and are suggesting a course of marketing action they respond with something along the lines of, “Oh no, my clients wouldn’t like that.”

What they really mean is that they don’t like the idea and they are looking at the minds of their customers, clients or patients through the lens of personal preferences.

They haven’t walked in their moccasins!

I think you have probably heard me say that you cannot know a person until you have spent three moons in their moccasins. That means you’ve really gotta stop thinking as you do and think like your target market. Their views can be substantially different to yours and therefore they will have a different outlook on things to you.

As an example, years ago I had a client who specialised in footwear for females over 40 with hard to fit feet. Because of that they often bought shoes which really weren’t comfortable and couldn’t be worn for long.

With his specialist range, he not only could find shoes that fitted them but looked pretty good (or at least better than the clunky shoes they were forced to wear).

Now to promote and sell them there was no way he could allow his opinion (or the opinions of his wife who hated them) to interfere with how we marketed those shoes.

When I talked to the target market (females over 40 with hard to fit feet) they told me that, “I’ve got a wardrobe full of shoes I can’t wear!”

So, it was simple to advertise to that market. All we had to do was create an advert with the headline “Women! Do you have a wardrobe full of shoes you can’t wear?”

When we ran it, customers poured through the door! They told us that that advertisement literally leapt off the page and sucked them into reading it.

Sales boomed!

All because we simply thought like the customer We, quite appropriately, walked in their moccasins.

Never let your personal preferences dictate what you should be saying to your market. Well, that’s unless it’s against the law, culture, ethics or morality!