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Do your personal preferences cloud your judgement?
Graham Hawkes

Do your personal preferences cloud your judgement?


 

Sometimes when I suggest a course of action to clients they respond with something along the lines of, “Oh no, my clients wouldn’t like that.”  What they really mean is that they personally don’t like the idea and they are not looking at the idea through the minds of their customers.

 

As my marketing mentor Winston Marsh would say, “You cannot know a person until you have spent three moons in their moccasins. That means you’ve really got to stop thinking as you do and think like your target market. Their views can be substantially different to yours and therefore they’ll have a different outlook on things to you”

 

As an example, Winno had a client who specialised in footwear for females over 40 with hard to fit feet. Because of that they often bought shoes which really weren’t comfortable and couldn’t be worn for long.  With his specialist range, he not only could find shoes that fitted them but looked pretty good (or at least better than the clunky shoes they were forced to wear).

To promote and sell them there was no way that client could allow his opinion (or the opinion of his wife who hated them) to interfere with how those shoes were marketed.
So when Winno talked to the target market (females over 40 with hard to fit feet) they told him, “I’ve got a wardrobe full of shoes I can’t wear!”

So, it was simple to advertise to that market. All they had to do was create an advert with the headline “Women! Do you have a wardrobe full of shoes you can’t wear?”
When they ran it, customers poured through the door! They told them that that advertisement literally leapt off the page and sucked them into reading it.

Sales boomed!  All because Winston Marsh and his client simply thought like the customer. They walked in their moccasins.

 

So never let your personal preferences dictate what you should be saying to your market.  Get out there and talk to them.  Find out what gives them a headache – or in this case foot ache – and offer them a cure.  That is marketing that works!

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