I eat whole bags of Doritos on the couch. Or at least I can. I mean, I don’t do it every day. It’s just an occasional thing. I mean I hardly ever do it. Really. Shhhhh…Don’t. Tell. Anyone. Oh, crap. Now I’ve done it. Big Data has my human frailty in its clutches.
It’s true, I can eat a WHOLE bag of cool ranch Doritos on the couch. Usually while drinking chardonnay. And, until this post, no where in my Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn profile would you find that admission. So “Big Data”? Well, until today, it didn’t know that about me. Even Alexa didn’t have this Big Data Marketing point about me because it’s not like I ever put “Doritos” on my shopping list. They only manage to make their way into my basket, back home and onto the couch with me during a particularly gnarly bout of PMS, when my BF has pissed me off or when I’ve disappointed a client in some way.
And that’s the problem with using Big Data marketing tools in a vacuum. While Big Data has value, it is the compilation of the data points people WANT you to know about them. It’s not a true picture of real life. And when you are developing your customer profile, you have to ferret out the not-so-appealing points about your customers — warts and all — or you will never have a true picture of your ideal customer and you will miss valuable cues on how to market to them.
Big Data doesn’t understand “Keeping up with the Jones’s”
As much as Big Data can tell us about purchasing habits, responses to the customer experience with repeat buying, preferences and behavior patterns like time and geography of purchases, it has yet to develop a way to assess “why” we purchase. There are data points that can give you some insight, but as a marketers, we have to marry those data points to assessments of human strengths, frailties and other motivations to develop marketing campaigns that convert.
For example, we work with a company whose products are for a very high-end, very elite and wealthy audience. And we can track where they shop, what kinds of cars they buy, how much education they typically have and more. And that helps us a lot, but, what we realized in developing their customer profile is we needed to test “why” they might respond to various images, copy and other cues in our campaigns. So, using our experience and that of our client, we brainstormed two chief reasons they might purchase the client’s product and those were:
- “Keeping up with the Jones’s” — an innate need to look good to their neighbors or,
- “A better life for my children” — a desire to see their children surpass them
A little A/B testing of these clients — with one piece of imagery (and associated copy) showing a man shaking hands with another man who had an expensive watch and a beautiful woman hanging on his shoulder and another piece of imagery showing a parent hugging a graduating child — and, hands down, the “keeping up with the Jones’s” email had the greatest response. Human frailty at its finest. But, like my Doritos, nothing anyone would ever admit on a profile page.
You might not like what you learn
It’s true. Do you think we were happy when we discovered the buyers were more motivated by one-upping the neighbors than by seeing a child excel? Not really, but then again — it’s not our job as marketers to judge the human experience. Our job is to understand it. Just feel okay when you realize that the “why” someone does something can have upsides. For example, we also learned that this “keeping up with the Jones’s” customer will often want to be perceived as doing good works. So he will respond really well to campaigns that feature CSR, because he likes to be seen as charitable by his peers. So we get good works out of a shallow guy? That’s a win!
Discovering the traits and trends Big Data can’t provide
So, how do you discover what Big Data can’t tell you? You take the Big Data you have and you take the largest preponderance of common traits to build your “base customer” — then you get in a room with your product development team and your marketing team and you start building a comprehensive “ideal customer profile” based on what you know about the human experience. Here are a few of the questions we ask when developing an ideal customer profile:
- Why does he buy his coffee there? The difference between a regular Starbucks coffee drinker and a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee drinker tells us a lot about the customer that we can use in branding, campaign and even the simplest thing like offering a gift card as a promotional reward. But it can also tell us that that the Dunkin’ Donuts drinker eschews pretentiousness and thinks he’s too macho to drink fancy coffee. Add to that he’s driving a Ford Truck and shopping at Home Depot over Lowes, and you get a guy who is not going to respond to a “keeping up with the Jones’s” campaign. But data points alone didn’t tell you that — your gut about these points combined did.
- What kind of vehicle does he want to drive? Big data may tell you what kind of vehicle he drives now, but you may have to use your knowledge of this customer’s personality to know what kind of car he wants to drive. The mini-van driving Dad data point you have in hand may not reflect his desire for a contest featuring a chance to win a Porsche 718 Cayman. But you will know this by thinking about 10 guys you know who drive their kids to soccer in that mini-van wishing the whole time they were in that Porsche Cayman.
- What’s a day in the life like for this customer? Think through whether they live traditionally with Mom at home with the kids or if they are new-millennium co-parents. That will make a difference in things like deciding your gender pronouns in your copy. Or whether they rent in a downtown area and walk to work. That will help you identify they may respond to sports gear as a promo. We start at 6:00 a.m. and try and think through what our customers day would typically be like up until they go to bed. When do they pick-up the kids, or dinner. What time do they sit down to watch the news and is it on a TV or their laptop? These insights will give you a view of your customer pure Big Data can’t.
Test and re-test
So here’s the thing. My firm builds customer profiles by layering “gut instinct” concepts onto Big Data and that is, quite frankly, not scientific. We know. But we feel confident doing it because we have many, many years of experience.
That said, we still have the good sense to test our theories in ways the new digital world allows us to — A/B testing via emails and landing pages being the cornerstone of those tests. So we put our egos aside as gently as possible and test our gut-instincts. We use the science to validate the “art” of marketing.
You should do the same.
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Today’s post by Angela Kendall, Mission Commander.