Module Overview

Welcome to the module on ‘Consumer Centricity’.

Very often, companies focus on the sales process without giving a thought as to
how customers feel about their product or service quality. Keeping this in mind,
let’s remember all the times we, as customers, struggled to get a solution to our
problems or how many times the products that we bought did not meet our
expectations.

The point is customer satisfaction is way more important than we think. Think of
the following examples and see how the marketers ensured to keep their consumers
fulfilled.

In this module

Let's see what are the topics you will learn in this module from Professor Suresh
Malodia

Importance of Consumer
Focus: Part 1
Marketing helps organisations understand and deliver value to their consumers. For
this reason, the consumer is considered the keystone of marketing. With this in
mind, what is likely to happen when an organisation does not understand or pay
attention to what its consumers want? What will truly happen if, instead, you are
able to maintain and manage consumer relationships?

In the upcoming video, you will see classic examples that demonstrate why
consumer focus is essential to a firm and how firms such as Nestle and Netflix
were able to adapt to the changing consumer behaviour, thereby staying
consumer-focussed, whereas Blockbuster, although being the go-to choice for
many users in the video rental space, got trumped due to the lack of it.

In this video, you saw that Nestle created an effective value proposition by creating
Butterfinger, focussing its marketing efforts on the unique benefit and generating
value for the consumers. Netflix did the same by doing away with the concept of
late fee and later adopting the subscription-based streaming model.

In the upcoming video, you will see a few more examples of companies that failed
due to poor consumer focus and those that won by emphasising on consumer focus

In this video, you saw examples of companies such as Blackberry and Kodak,
which lost their market share because they were too focussed on their
technologies or too narrowly focussed on their competitors.

Importance of Consumer
Focus: Part 2
Staying customer-focussed is not just crucial for enterprises but for any
organisation that caters to a group of people. In the next video, you will go through
an example of a non-enterprise entity that has succeeded by staying customer-
focussed.

You saw that staying consumer-focussed is crucial for any organisation that caters
to a group of people. In the next video, you will see a company that has built a
strong position by making customer service the key point of its value proposition.

Now that you have seen various examples of both enterprise and non-enterprise
entities, let’s discuss the reasons why customer focus is so important to a
marketer. 

You saw multiple examples of companies who grew due to their consumer-centric
approach and other examples who failed due to lack of consumer focus. You also
saw the reasons why this is important to a marketer. 

Importance of consumer focus

One of the promotional content pieces by Google was this ad. This video clip is a clip
showing a lot of people asking the question why. Every year Google has carved a
campaign around the theme, 'Year in Search' Why do you think Google comes up
with such campaigns every year?
 Answer
It creates such promotional pieces so that people are encouraged to search for
more such questions on the platform Google and to connect people worldwide,
creating a strong brand recall for the organisation.

In the next segment, you will learn what are these consumer insights that will
help you in crafting your marketing strategy and how to derive these insights.

Consumer Insights
In the previous segment, you saw how important it is for companies to have a
focus on their customers and how this can determine the success or failure of a
company. However, for any business to stay customer-focussed, it is important to
gain customer insights.

You all know of Uber, the on-demand transportation service. How do you think
Uber went about understanding its target segment?

It understood that every user wanted to have a ‘personal ride’ and did not want to
‘negotiate with the cab driver/auto driver’ on the fare of the journey. This was an
excellent insight, as it helped Uber to target the specific needs of consumers
accordingly.

So, what are these insights?

Well, they are the fundamental motivations that underlie an individual’s behaviour.

Why we do what we do.

As a marketing leader, it is important for you to understand the buying behaviour

of the customers in your industry by gathering customer insights and then take
certain action based on these insights. So, further, listen to Siddharth Kapoor as he
explains how this can be done with the help of another example.
 As a marketing professional, it is important to understand the buying behaviour of
customers in your industry through gaining customer insights. Insights are
fundamental motivations that underlie a human’s behaviour backed by research
or years of experience. For example, you saw how Snickers positioned itself as the
go-to snack for its consumers. In the next video, let’s see more examples of
customer insights that have helped companies stay customer-focussed in their
industries.

In this video, you saw that insights help in deciding a communication strategy for
brands.

What are the common characteristics that you identified in each of these
examples? What is it that makes an insight? Let’s learn about it in the next video

In this video, with the help of Amazon’s example, you saw that there are four traits
that help identify an insight. These are as follows:

1. It should be non-obvious.
2. It needs to be actionable.
3. It has the potential to change consumer behavior when acted upon.
4. It drives mutual benefit for customers and has long-term value for the organisation.

But how to derive customer insights within your industry as a marketing

professional? 

In the next segment, you will learn how to do that

 Consumer Insights
Seagram’s Imperial Blue is one of the leading brands of Indian whisky with a blend
of imported Scotch malt. It runs its famous ‘Men Will Be Men’ campaign across
offline and online channels by talking about its music CDs. What, according to you, is
the insight behind this communication strategy for Seagram?
Answer
The brand plays on the lighter side of a man’s life. It believes that there are some
common traits men share that makes them act in a certain way, especially when
dealing with the opposite gender. Its campaign is built around the universal insight
that whatever the situation and environment, men will always behave like men.

Consumer Insights
Assume that you were recently hired by an ad agency that created this quirky TVC for
7UP featuring its familiar mascot Fido Dido. The ad attracted a lot of attention.
Owing to this, the brand has approached you again to create another similar 360°
campaign spanning TV, digital, outdoor and social media. Based on the information
provided here, what will you fill in the insight for this ad?
Think fresh to tackle challenges
✓ Correct
Feedback:
Correct! 7UP’s philosophy is about inspiring the youth to ‘think fresh' and use
their wit to effortlessly tackle challenging situations.

What are the common characteristics that you identified in each of these
examples? What is it that makes an insight? Let’s learn about it in the next video.

In this video, with the help of Amazon’s example, you saw that there are four traits
that help identify an insight. These are as follows:

1. It should be non-obvious.
2. It needs to be actionable.
3. It has the potential to change consumer behavior when acted upon.
4. It drives mutual benefit for customers and has long-term value for the organisation.
But how to derive customer insights within your industry as a marketing
professional? 

In the next segment, you will learn how to do that

Deriving Consumer
Insights
People may have many opinions, beliefs and tendencies - some controllable, some
beyond their control. How all these factors interact with each other impacts the
consumer actions and choices, and this becomes the prime motivation behind
finding an insight. To understand this, let’s learn about some of the factors that
influence a consumer decision.

Here, you looked at the factors that influence a consumer’s purchase decision. You
have already learnt how to identify some of these factors when you were looking at
STP while studying the fundamentals of marketing. The remaining will be covered
in the next session.

This brings us to the question that you have been wondering all along: How do you
do that? How to identify the factors that influence a consumer’s purchase decision?
How to derive insights? Well, this can be done with user research. What is user
research?

It refers to the different research methodologies that you can use as a marketer to
derive customer insights.
 

In the next video, let’s understand the methods of user research to derive consumer
insights

Some of the methods of user research that you saw in the video are as follows: 

And lastly, your own wisdom. There is not one thing to decide what counts as
wisdom. It could be your experience in the field, your observations from day-to-
day activities, and interactions with your customers or experts alike.

But of course, there is a framework that decides how to carry out the process of
deriving insights. In the next video, let’s learn more about this in detail

In this video, you learnt about the steps involved in deriving insights. These are as
follows:
 Define the problem statement,

 Collect data using the three methods described above, and

 Generate an insight hypothesis from the results and the checklist.

For more on the importance of consumer focus and consumer insights, you may
refer to the additional reading links below. 

Additional readings
 100 of the most customer-centric companies:  This article talks about the top 100
companies in the world that focus on customer centricity in their marketing
approach and how they benefited from it.
 Five ways to gain customer insight: A guide for marketers :  This article talks
about different ways to gain consumer insights from a marketer’s perspective.
 User research module (prep course):  This module is a part of the prep course on
how to conduct user research in detail. Click on the link to know more!

In the next session, you will understand what are the motivations that drive
consumer behaviour and how you need to tap into them as a marketer.

Consumer Insights
A firm chose to go with a communication strategy based on the top result of the
research that it conducted. Its primary message was - “Take a peek into the book you
always wanted to read”. It saw over a million app downloads within six months. 

However, the firm observed that 70% of the customers who made app visits looked
for a book in the navigation bar and stayed on the app only if they found an excerpt
from the book; otherwise, they left. This slowly started to amount to a loss of
customers. The biggest roadblock for the firm was that acquiring the legal rights to
offer book excerpts was a long process since it involved permissions from authors,
publishers and distributors. Very often, it was not able to get their approvals in the
end.

Apart from the acquired customers whom the firm was losing quickly, there was
another class of customers who did not use the navigation bar but visited the app
65% of the time when an app notification was sent to them. Sometimes, these users
stayed on the app for a long time; at other times, they stayed for approximately one
or two excerpts’ reading time, which varies from 7 to 10 minutes. Based on the
research given above and the user behaviour that you saw, what type of customers
should the firm go after?

Those who want to consume any reading content during travel or

when they are free
✓ Correct
Feedback:
Correct! This is the category of customers that the firm should go after, as these
are the ones who are visiting the app to read excerpts and are not driven by the
presence of a specific excerpt from a particular book or author. You can
influence them with push notifications and other communication modes.

Consumer Insights
Watch the following ads by Tinder.

Ad1 
Ad2 
Can you identify the insights in each of these ads?

Ad 1: The real world is scary, and millennials want to stay in their

bubble of exploring life with different people.
Ad 2: Everyone's idea of an ideal date is different, and with online
dates becoming more popular, people are coming up with their own
unique ideas to date.
✓ Correct
Feedback:
Correct! Insights are the fundamental motivations for understanding a
consumer's buying behaviour. 
Ad 1 highlights that approaching people and connecting with them can be very
scary, and millennials want to stay in their bubble. The campaign is around
‘Adulting Can Wait’.
Ad 2 stresses how every individual might have a different vision of an ideal
date, and with online dates becoming more popular, people are coming up with
their own unique ideas to date.