“Customer is the king”: recited a famous mantra, now more relevant and true than ever. In the era of customer-centric marketing and the hyper-personalization of the customer experience, empathy toward the customer becomes essential to meet and overcome new challenges.
But how to empathize with one’s users first, and with one’s customers later? The first step to take is perhaps the most complex and involves a real change in perspective that leads us to consider the customer, real or potential, not as a mere consumer, but as a person.
To do this, it is, therefore, necessary to abandon an objective perspective and go deeper, collecting and analyzing as much data as can be gathered.
Whereas in the past, marketing orientations and models had accustomed us to considering our audience only in terms of targets, i.e. clusters of users identified mainly on the basis of specific demographics (gender, age, education, employment), today it is essentially qualitative and behavioural data that play a crucial role in the profiling and segmentation of our users.
Understanding clients’ personalities: help coming from psychology
Each individual has his or her own personality, we are different from each other, but in some respects, it will seem strange, we resemble each other.
Being able to know the salient traits that unite multiple personalities becomes critical to segmenting clients. On this juncture, psychology and particularly the Big Five theory , which, among the various theories of client personality, is considered the one that can explain the most individual variability, also comes to our aid.
According to this theory, there are five major factors that influence clients’ personalities and allow for their categorization.
Let’s find out about them in detail.
- Extroversion: the extrovert personality is characterized by sociability, talkativeness, assertiveness and a high amount of emotional expressiveness. In contrast, introverted people prefer solitude, do not like to converse and have less energy to spend in public and social settings.
- Pleasantness: people who meet this characteristic usually are confident, altruistic, kind and empathize more easily with others. In contrast, people with low pleasantness are competitive and show little interest in others.
- Conscientiousness: usually very concerned, people characterized by conscientiousness focus very much on goals and are able to control their impulses effectively. Attentive to details, they plan every move in advance and are generally aware of their ability to influence others.
- Neuroticism: moodiness, emotional instability are the salient traits of neurotic personalities. These can hardly overcome moments of crisis and cope with stress. In contrast, non-neurotic people tend to be more emotionally stable as well.
- Open-mindedness: this is the characteristic shared by creative and intuitive people. These are personalities eager to learn new things and have new experiences. In contrast, people with little open-mindedness show themselves to be traditionalists and averse to novelty.
These five factors and their antonyms encapsulate the different nuances that characterize an individual’s personality, including as a consumer. Here then, a consumer with a more extroverted personality will be more inclined to value the hedonistic value of a product and inclined to develop a more emotional involvement with the brand. On the other hand, on the other hand, a consumer with amore “conscientious” personality will be more interested in the functionality and technical features of an item and, therefore, more inclined to appreciate more rational rather than emotional advertising campaigns.
he Big Five model is a valuable aid for optimizing efforts in strategy and communication in order to build a profitable relationship with one’s audience, starting precisely with an initial segmentation of customers.
7+1 customer personalities: how to recognize them?
While the Big Five model provides us with an initial psychological approach to getting to know our audience better, there are other theoretical contributions that have emerged over the years in order to help us profile so many typical customers.
We give a few examples.
- The saver Conscientious and certainly detail-oriented personalities, that of price first and foremost. Savers are certainly not brand loyal, but only to the cheapest offer and represent, therefore a difficult cluster to retain.
- The gift lover We could also ascribe gift lovers to the category of savers. However, unlike the former, they are not looking for the best offer, but for the gift and freebie, for which they may even be willing to spend more. The gift-lover is often very active on social groups looking for coupons but is difficult to engage as they rarely buy.
- The impulsive This is a more extroversion-oriented personality; he or she buys without thinking because perhaps he or she “falls in love with the product,” and often an effective banner and communication in an emotional key is enough to win him or her over.
- The skeptic It is difficult to win over: an offer is not enough and often not even good story telling. Usually the skeptic does not trust regardless and rarely buys. When he does, he leaves nothing to chance and evaluates every single feature of the product or service.
- The loyal This is undoubtedly the type of customer that every eCommerce would like to have. He buys, usually, with some regularity because he trusts that brand and has espoused its philosophy and values. His business is the result of a relationship that the brand itself has been able to create.
- The practical Safe and fast purchasing processes, but not only that: the consumer who reflects this profile chooses to buy online mainly for convenience and perhaps lack of time. He expects to find all the information with ease so as to conclude the process the few clicks.
- The Active Consulting reviews, staying up-to-date on offers and news, inquiring about products and/services on communities and forums: the active consumer is curious and does not stop at the first offer or recommended product. They analyze, inform themselves and make decisions often following a very rational decision path.
- Experience Hunter This is definitely the type of consumer that is becoming increasingly popular. He is not brand loyal, usually, he evaluates and chooses the experiential universe that revolves around the product and the brand, and because of that he is always looking for something that can surprise him
Psychological characteristics, buying habits and behaviors, spending ability, and more: the elements that contribute to the creation of a consumer’s profile are indeed many and very often variable. Themodels given above are examples that risk, however, limiting the knowledge of one’s audience.
There is perhaps a need for something more!
Customer Data Platform: when data creates the consumer profile!
In order to delve deeper into the topic related to evolved profiling of one’s audience, let us try to change the point of view, starting with data and arriving at a classification of profiles.
On-line as well as off-line there is a great deal of data that real and potential customers release in their interaction with the brand and its products/services: biographical data, information on tastes and interests, buying habits and frequency, browsing behaviors, and much more.
All this data, when collected and normalized in a single environment, can help us create comprehensive profiles of each and every member of our audience-no more verisimilitude profiles, but absolutely real ones!
All of this is made possible by the use of Customer Data Platform: by aggregating data from sources and multiple channels and normalizing it at the single customer view level, CDP creates a dynamic, comprehensive and exhaustive database and a holistic view on each profile.
From data to marketing activities, the step is short: a CDP enables not only the collection and normalization of data, but also theiractivation in terms of advanced profiling and segmentation, as well as the preparation of marketing activities aimed at personalizing the online and offline customer experience.
