Customer Profiling Market Research
What can Customer Profiling Market Research Do for My Business?
- Knowing who your customers are, what their demographics are and even their psychographics can help to understand what their priorities are and even how they would prioritize the features and capabilities of their products.
- A portion of most customer profiling studies is usually dedicated to probing on how the product are actually being used in the real world. This information can lend great insights to the product marketers as they develop the next generations of follow-on products.
- Understand whether or not the product plan for the next few years is well aligned with the identified target customer and their typical usage.
- There are cases where product sales are much higher in one region or climate than in another. Understanding the reasons for those differences can benefit the marketing plan. For example Subaru sales tend be mainly focus in snow or ski areas because one of their perceived strengths is their ability to drive well on snow. My guess is that Subaru doesn't spend as much time marketing Subarus in Phoenix Arizona as they do in the Great Rocky Mountains.
What is Customer Profiling Market Research?
Customer profiling is simply analyzing current customers of a particular product or brand to understand what characteristics they might have in common (industry, annual sales, number of employees, technological attitudes, educational level, income, usage patterns, cost-conscious, quality sensitive…). In many case there are two groups that are profiled in order to provide a comparison point - often a similar product made by another brand. The information found from customer profiling is typically used to provide guidance to the product development team for future product generations.
In many cases customer profiling is done on a regular basis (once every quarter, year…) in order to monitor any possible changes in the characteristics of a typical customer.
How Does Customer Profiling Market Research Work?
Customer Profiling market research is almost always a quantitative venture, at least initially. There are times when the quantitative data is a little bit too "flat" to really understand what the responses meant, and in that case a small qualitative study may be commissioned to understand some of the more subtle details that distinguish the customers of a particular brand or model from those of the public at large or of another brand's products that may also have been profiled in order to provide a point of comparison.
