Understanding customers: role play

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Question - How do I find out how my customer thinks?

Key action points

One of the smartest comments we have ever heard made about branding was by Andy Graham, of the One Brand Group, who said that you do not sell your products to your customers; you sell your customers to your customers, then they will buy your products.

Chris Cardell says something similar when he advises us to use the word you as often as we can when addressing our customers. It helps to keep us focused on the benefits we are trying to get across.

The classic consultancy sales pitch starts: you are wonderful, you have done wonderful things, yet there is one problem that you are trying to address that we can solve. Here is how.

But what makes your customers feel beautiful? If you can find that out, you can sell them loads of products.

You can, of course, ask them. However, you will be trying to get in deep, and that is a complex thing to research.

So you may have to use some psychological techniques.

This one is based on the work of a Canadian called Ervine Goffman and is called role play. His theory was that, while we are who we are, we tend to project different personae in different situations. The way we behave at home is not the way we behave at work (for better or worse). So, to understand someone fully, you have to examine them in different contexts.

The exercise we have put together can be done as an individual or as a group. It asks you to focus on one specific key customer contact at a time, and to make some assessments or guesses about how s/he behaves and thinks in different situations. We have chosen a wedding, at home, a day out and at work. You can change these if you wish, and you can change the questions we ask, but the important thing is to try to understand the human being behind the business contact.

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