Depth Interview
They generally use small samples and also conduct direct one to one personal interviews. A detailed background is provided by the respondents and elaborate data concerning the respondents opinions, values, motivation, expression, feeling etc are obtained. Even their non-verbal expressions are observed. They take long time, therefore lengthy observations are involved. These are conducted to […]
It is the People Who Contribute to Operational Excellence
Establishing leadership whether in a product market or a services market is not easy, especially in the fast changing world where the life cycle of products and services tends to be very short. A look at the Companies that have grown in stature and maintained their growth story tells you of the hard work that […]
Social Media Channel and Tools
Social Media Channels contain thousands of websites, blogs, forums, videos and so on. Individuals have now begun to spend most of their free time online catching up with various conversations and topics of their interest. When one wishes to get the latest update on news, entertainment, movies, music as well as catch up with what […]
Why Managers need to Wake up to the Century of Declines and Scarcity
From the Era of Abundance to the Era of Scarcity The era of abundance is over and we are entering an era of scarcity. Right from oil and minerals to water and food, every resource that we have used to power and drive our civilization to modernity and progress is in decline. This means that […]
Introduction to Corporate Communication: Need and its Importance
Why is Corporate Communication Needed? With the proliferation of activities that any company does, there needs to be a mechanism through which it advertises its achievements, answers queries about its performance, and has a window to the external world in times of crises and other catastrophes. The corporate communication department of any organization performs the […]
For a developing business it is very important to understand who are the best customers, how to find more customers like these and where to find. Customer profiling is the best strategy to accomplish this. It helps to find valuable new customers, enhance the profitability by retaining existing customers and also identify low valued customers so as to minimize the cost to reach them. Customer profiling is a behavioral relationship marketing technique which includes a variety of marketing strategies ranging from simple one’s to most complex one’s.
Customer profiling starts with identification of relevant information regarding all the satisfied existing customers and then try to target new prospects with matching profiles. The profiles of customers can be categorized differently according to some influential variables present in their profile.
For example, let’s examine the following two customer profiles:
The first profile clearly indicates that the customer characteristics are demographic. The demographic profiles always help the suppliers to attract the customers and generate good revenue in the amateur stages of projects; these projects are basically online projects. The first profile will be interesting for someone inside the organization who is in advertisement department or who is involved in deciding the content and matter of websites.
The second profile can be depicted as a behavioral profile. The basic questions arise regarding to this profile should be, will they buy again? Will they visit again? A behavioral profile indicates the prominence of the relationship with customer in near future hence these profiles are crucial for organizations that focus on retaining more customers to increase their business value. Although behavioral profiles are more prominent than demographic but a combination of both provides a powerful and strong database to decide the customer characteristics in efficient way. The following steps depicts an ideal profiling technique:
The above process is involved ideally for simple profiling which can become complex for complex strategies. After profiling is completed the customers are then segmented according to segmentation variables. Every customer has individual preferences, needs and behavior associated with products which are different from other customers. Substantially it becomes impossible for suppliers to manage customers separately on individual characteristics; hence they pool customers into separate segments according to the type and variables they have in common.
Invalid or wrong information passed while profiling process will result in suboptimal decisions and unworthy consequences and could fetch customer dissatisfaction and could even lead to customer defect. Hence all the information and data should be validated and corrected before profiling is done. Customer profiling is the basis of market research techniques and is proved to be the most useful strategy under any circumstances in customer acquisition approach.
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