I recently read the Ribbon Farm blog on Marketing, Innovation & Creation of a customer, and it it provided me a fresh perspective of what a customer truly is. I wanna talk about the main highlights I got from it:
the redefinition of the customer
the interplay between marketing and innovation
custom GPT I made
Redefining the Customer
Customer is always right! Customer will uptimately decide! Customer is king! A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all! REALLY?
We often talk about the 'customer' as if they are gods! Let's take a step back and now Repeat after me: a customer is not a human being. Instead, a customer is a novel and stable pattern of human behavior. For examples:
how 'Googling' has become a stable pattern for searching information. Google solved the human behaviour of searching for information.
transportation is a stable pattern of human behavior, and cars fulfilled that need (vs horses).
in Bombay, vendors sell 'time pass,' which is just a small pack of chickpeas in cones to entertain people waiting for their train. The human behavior pattern where people get frustrated while waiting and need something to occupy themselves, thus becoming more at peace.
Spotify caters to the behaviour of wanting personalized music experiences and easy access to a wide range of music
Amazon meets the human behaviour of wanting fast and reliable shopping.
Instagram addresses the human behaviour for social connection and self-expression.
Marketing & Innovation
Marketing and innovation might seem like two different worlds. However, both are focused on understanding and stabilizing human behavior patterns. Marketing deciphers the language of these behaviors, while innovation works on creating products/service that act as stimuli to these behaviors.
Both market & build cannot function together "simultaneously". Generally it's one after the other and they keep on oscillating!
Target human behaviours >> target ICP
Shift your focus when building or marketing something. Don’t concentrate solely on the "product" or the "marketing tactics" or "ideal customer". Instead, focus on who the customer really is (stable pattern of human behavior). Next time you’re developing a product or crafting a marketing strategy, shift your focus. Ask yourself, what stable human behavior pattern am I addressing?
Wardley map
We make wardley map with a hypothesis of a specific user type we love to work with and then rate their wants in Y axis. Technically, we are just trying to understand their behaviour pattern. After a few conversations, we generally start to see human behaviour pattern emerge. If it's not emerging, you are talking too sparsely and you should have much more conversations. Once identified, group the behaviors you aim to address & address it with your innovation.
PS: wardley maps rates them in Y-axis & helps to identify tailwind via X-axis to judge if your startup idea is worth funding or not! None of this x-y axis matters if it gives you fulfilment to address for a human behaviour! (I killed a lot of ideas I was passionate to Wardley maps, not worth it)
I made a Custom GPT for finding stable human behaviour pattern given a website!
Customer behavior GPT - Try it out and give me feedback!
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