Millennial employees gathered in boardroom for training, black boss ceo leader leading corporate … [+]
Customer intimacy is an essential component of your ability to build an inclusive brand. In recent years, a number of brands have made missteps when it comes to engaging diverse, niche, and underserved consumers, and in most instances, it’s because they don’t have a sufficient degree of customer intimacy.
The best way to develop a deep degree of intimacy with your customers, particularly diverse ones, is to spend time with them, and develop quality emotional relationships with them.
Another effective way is to do market research. The good news is that more brands are engaging diverse consumers in research to understand more about how their differences impact their experiences. A best practice in conducting that research is to ensure there is representation throughout all aspects of the research process, from strategy, to writing discussion guides, to moderating focus groups and interviews, and all the way through to analyzing the results.
Why representation in your end-to-end market research process is essential
Renita Bryant is the founder and Chief Consultant at SightsSet Consulting, a market research and insights company. She notes that connection points that come from representation are an important aspect of helping brands get the insights they need from the consumers they are learning from: “We always talk about how people buy from brands and people that they know like and trust. And I think our human nature is to gravitate towards people that we feel some sense of connection to. And the more connection points that we can create with someone else, the faster that knowing, liking and trusting happens.”
Bryant added that understanding nuance is why representation is paramount throughout the duration of the research process.
“There are certain nuances. We need to understand that that woman, that moderator, that 30-something year old Black woman that fits into that target is also going to understand how to navigate those nuances in language and conversation, that someone else that’s not necessarily in that group may not understand.”
I saw this play out firsthand in research projects for clients where I was a part of the process from start to finish, including moderating the interviews specifically for Black consumers. In many cases rapport and a degree of trust were established quickly. There were a number of small comments that were made that I knew to latch on to and probe more deeply on, that uncovered powerful insights. The consumers’ degree of comfort with me impacted their degree of openness and candor for the better, which of course impacted the answers they gave.
MORE FOR YOU
Dr. Joel Mier is a professor of marketing at University of Richmond, and Managing Partner at The Mier Practice consultancy. I sat on a panel with him a few months ago where we covered this topic. He explained:
“If you think about the crafting of the questions, the discussion or the moment when you’re face-to-face, and then the interpretation. You’ve got three different levels here, and if you’re off by 20 degrees for each, you’re off by 60 degrees when you’re all done.”
This year, another client asked me to weigh-in on some survey results they’d just gotten back for a project I wasn’t involved in. The two women who worked on the survey were White, and trying to analyze the results specifically from the African-American population, and were struggling to understand some of the responses. We spent about twenty minutes chatting, where I gave them some insight from a cultural standpoint, that they weren’t aware of that helped them understand the data.
Customer intimacy is your unfair advantage when it comes to delivering products, services, and experiences that make your customers feel like they belong with you. As you use primary research to develop a deeper degree of intimacy, remember that representation in the research process from start to finish isn’t just a nice to have. It will materially impact the quality of the results of your project, which will in turn impact the quality of the products, services, and experiences you deliver to the customers you want to serve.
