I remain intrigued by the way that some businesses still place their own perception of target customer needs over actual (researched/ validated) target customer needs. This practice is equivalent to throwing a dart at a dart board blindfolded, and more often than not will result in a high level of wastage in terms of materials and labour most particularly.

If your business has this mindset, I strongly suggest that you review the sensibility of continuing to take this “production-driven” approach to running/ managing your business before it’s too late…and before either you fall completely out of touch with what target customers currently actually demand/ want/ need, and/ or your “miss:hit” ratio becomes so skewed in favour of “misses” that all economies go out of your production process.

If you want to instead maximise the likelihood of target customers connecting with your business, then go and ask them what needs/ desires/ wants they have – to then produce your product/ service offer that closely aligns to these needs/ desires/ wants. In formal commercial speak, this is called performing “marketing research”.

Most importantly, market research enables you to discover with some certainty:

  • What specific product/ service needs target customers have
  • What your “typical” target customer looks like – in terms income, age, gender…and most importantly their psychographic profile

The psychographic profile of target customers could (for example) be that they are “sophisticated”, or that they are “discerning”. Psychographic profiles are about the “attitudes and behaviours” of people…what makes them “tick”…what makes them commit to doing something versus avoid doing something else (e.g. commit to purchasing one product over another).

My first book delves into forms of market research that I advocate all businesses should perform – and why. I have worked with one of the largest and most well respected market research companies in Australasia (Colmar Brunton) designing and implementing large scale market research. In the current era you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to obtain useful market insights; rather, there are a number of websites which allow SME scale businesses which may be cash flow poor to perform market research. Align yourself with the actual needs (as opposed to “perceived needs”) of target customers and your business revenue achievement should improve noticeably.