Now that we’ve discussed how you can come to understand your audience better, it’s about time that we looked at how this understanding can inform the decisions you make and the actions you take when it comes to running your business...

Developing and maintaining a solid understanding of your audience will enable your business to take many steps towards a more consumer-centric approach.

Firstly, it’ll allow you to target and personalize your marketing messages and recommendations far more effectively so that what consumers receive from your brand is relevant and valuable to them, clearly demonstrating how your brand will improve their lives in particular.

It’ll also help you when it comes to developing and managing your products and processes. They’ll adapt and evolve in a way that better satisfies consumer needs and expectations, whether that means making changes to your business’s logistics to meet demand, or developing new offerings for specific audience segments. Premium ice cream brand Ben and Jerry’s, for example, recognised that some consumers have more specific dietary requirements, and so it launched a range of dairy-free and gluten-free alternatives!

Lastly, understanding your audiences and the interactions they have with your business will allow you to make effective changes to your brand’s touchpoints. This might involve making information about your business more readily available, resolving issues with the checkout process, or improving any other element that makes it possible for audiences to get what they want from your business. Whatever the change, if it’s well-informed, it should ultimately make for a more satisfying consumer experience.

As you can see, listening to ‘The Voice of the Customer’ can really give you a clear understanding of how you can better serve your consumers and put them at the center of your business’s activities. But, you’ll only successfully do so if you follow this advice...

First of all, it’s important to recognise that collecting, interpreting and acting on ‘The Voice of the Customer’ should be an ongoing exercise. Naturally, people’s feelings, values and expectations change, so you need to check in as regularly as you can with your audience so that your understanding of them is as accurate and up to date as possible.

Secondly, when you’re assessing feedback, you should verify that the opinions that consumers are giving actually reflect reality. That’s not to say that they’re wrong, or that they’re being dishonest, but it could be that a small but vocal minority are skewing your results, and that the majority of your audience don't hold the same view. You can't always please everyone, and you don't want to make changes to satisfy the few if it’s going to negatively impact the experience that the many have with your brand, so ensure there’s a statistically significant number of people giving specific feedback, before flagging something as an area of concern.

Next, firmly committing the time and resources to review feedback and decide how your business will respond is essential. This should be done at regular intervals, or more frequently if something is identified that needs urgent attention.

It’s worth noting at this point that feedback doesn't always need acting on, and that it can still be valuable even if it doesn't call for improvements to be made. You could receive lots of feedback saying that one of your products is high-quality and fairly priced, for example, or that your customer service team is providing really helpful advice and support.

There’s nothing you urgently need to do with this information, but it’s still nice to know. It could tell you that that area of your business doesn't need your attention at the moment, and you’re doing a great job, and it’s still good to share and celebrate this kind of feedback with the wider business.

That’s all we have time for in this lesson. Just remember that one: a consumer-centric mindset is increasingly vital now that brands face such stiff competition and consumer expectations are so high. Two: consumer centricity is all about putting your consumers at the heart of everything your business does, and three: in order to do so, you’ll have to focus on really understanding your audiences by collecting, storing and analyzing all the data that makes up the all-important ‘Voice of the Customer’. Thanks for joining us!

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