An insight in Customer relationships

Dear readers, this is my first blog, and, in this post, I will share my understanding on the subject of Market Research & Gaining Customer Insights as well as sharing examples of my findings.

To market well in today’s industry, it is all about giving greater value to customers such as resolving their problems. And to do this you have to connect your business motive to your brand to attract customers which as a result creates value, as building connections and relationships to your customers is what market research is all about.

An example of this, is how, for instance after learning more in depth about customer insights, I looked at the example of P&G, one of the world’s largest and specialised marketing companies, where their marketing and advertising team relaunched their brand by looking at women’s needs in their lives rather than their cleaning needs by itself and they combined these two factors by doing deep primary research into the lives of these women where one of their connected brands ‘Tide’ were able to make 60% more profit with their cleaning products by linking women’s style with cleanliness as women were their biggest consumers.

A marketing specialist argued that many products in today’s competitive market have a lot of potential, however, it leads to a saturated market which only some brands get right and can expand their products or services to their right customers, which are known as target customers.

For example, this was the case for Apple when they launched their iPod in the year 2001. They were not the first to do so, but the first to succeed in their product launch which at the time became a blockbuster. This was because, they focused on their design to create a compact mobile device for listening to music and they focused their objective on customer’s individual needs which was to make music a more personal experience everywhere customers went to.

I have also learned that to gain precise customer insights, there needs to be extensive research done by marketers to study trends using contemporary technologies in the market to recruit information in great quantities. Nowadays this can be done in a number of diverse ways such as with the help of the growth of social media platforms such as Facebook Marketplace or TikTok shop, in contrary to how marketing information was collected not long ago by call centres, handwritten letters or in person surveys. This leads to my next point, which is how market research can be successful, but only when it provides real marketing research value. For example, having a dedicated team of marketers working on costumer insights to develop different business strategies within a business, such as an MIS looking at the Marketing environment as well as marketing managers and other information users to collect from a wide range of data and create more value for customers.

Reference List:

Kotler, P., Armstrong, G., Harris, L.C. and Hongwei, H. (2020) Principles of Marketing. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited. Ch 4