Working with a local manufacturing business this week suddenly brought about what some may call “an epiphanous moment”. Maybe we were just getting so close to the trees that we could not see the wood any more. But what emerged from our session was to us a message from which we believe many businesses can learn.
We had been exploring the whole area of client communication in its broadest sense – from packaging through advertising through service delivery through to what the sales people actually say about the company when they are ”at the sharp end” in the customers offices.
And what became abundantly clear was that the rules of the game had changed. To a limited extent this applied to the product range although that was not where we felt the greatest change had taken place. What had changed dramatically was the nature of many of the buyers.
Let us go back a bit – research confirms regularly that buyers do not just purchase a product. They buy the package of benefits that surrounds that product and that they enjoy from the purchase. And this is where we discovered the huge mindshift that had been eluding us – our buyers are increasingly from the “Now” generation. This has little or nothing to do with the transformational change happening in the country but it has everything to do with the way that younger buyers interact – they are looking for instant gratification. They want it but they want it now!!! It is much more a psychographic issue than a demographic one.
They live in an environment which places huge pressure on their time and with media like cell phones, SMS, Mixit, Face Book and the Internet devices things happen and happen quickly if not instantly. So this naturally affects their mindset in any and every buying situation – they want their needs met NOW!
And we would be missing a trick if we thought that it applied only to younger buyers – almost everybody is faced with the same increasing demands on our time and the need to “make things happen at pace”.
So what does that mean for us in small businesses? It means that we have to find new ways to make the links to customers – we need to make sure that our brand becomes a brand with which this new breed of buyer can easily associate.
We need to know exactly what our “new age” buyers are looking for and we have to find ways to deliver that. We have to re-examine the way we do business – starting from the bottom up and find ways to ensure that our “brand offering” in the broadest sense is relevant to buyers in the current generation.
We have to ‘connect’ in the way that our buyers understand and enjoy – we have to figure out what it is in our businesses that can truly resonate with our customers and will “connect” us to them in a way that will maximise their experience dealing with us. And if we don’t have it, we need to find it quickly if we are going to survive.
Tags: Brand, Business, customers, Enviroment, Product, review of marketing activities, Sales
