on intuition and past success as a marketing strategy.
Luckily, Apple learned its lesson. Four years later Forbes reported that the iPhone 5s had captured 34 percent of the Japanese smartphone market, in a country now widely considered as the world's most sophisticated, advanced, and competitive marketplace for smartphones.
The dramatic difference this time: Apple was keenly aware of what its Japanese buyers were expecting.
Apple is fortunate to be that rare brand with the resources to recover from such a stumble. Nonetheless, it would have been far less costly in terms of time, expense, labor, and brand reputation for Apple to have interviewed Japanese buyers about their smartphone expectations before this launch.
The story of Apple's iPhone launch in Japan reminds us that even the most admired companies cannot avoid one of the most basic rules of business: Know your customer.
Now that customers are choosing how and when they will engage with your sales and marketing efforts, this timeless truth is gaining new urgency, forcing companies to reconsider their approach to discovering and applying customer insight.
In 2012, the Corporate Executive Board's (CEB) Marketing Leadership Council released a widely cited study that concisely defined the problem, revealing that on average, business-to-business (B2B) customers are nearly 60 percent of the way through the purchase decision before engaging a sales representative. There is compelling evidence that customers of business-to-consumer (B2C) companies are equally likely to rely on peers and digital connections to guide their decisions about what to buy and which supplier they should trust.
We know that the 60 percent statistic cited in the CEB study is not universally applicable, but the trend is unmistakable – customers who have the resources and networks to make buying decisions without your input are happy to do so.
Armed with instant access to countless peer-reviewed options, customers are holding your sales and marketing teams to a new standard: Tell me what I want to know and help me find the right option at every stage of my buying decision, or I'll go somewhere else.
This change in customer decision making is a game changer for companies that have always relied on their salespeople to listen to each buyer's needs and create a winning argument, one customer at a time, while marketers stayed inside the building, churning out marketing materials and running campaigns that were based on a good deal of supposition about what their customers wanted to hear. If we start with the principle that effective communication requires good listening, it's easy to see that marketers have been working with a severe and illogical handicap.
Although the details about buyer personas are unclear to many, their goal is simple. Marketers must understand how markets full of buyers navigate the buying decision they want to influence so that they can become a useful, trusted resource throughout that decision. Marketers need to become good listeners if they want to be effective communicators.
Beko, a Turkish manufacturer of major household consumer appliances, took a very different tack than the Apple team that launched the iPhone 4 in Japan. They prepared for a launch into the lucrative and unfamiliar Chinese market by listening to buyers of electric clothes dryers.
According to David Meerman Scott, who visited with Beko executives in Istanbul in 2014, Beko staffers routinely conduct in-depth interviews with potential customers before introducing an appliance in any international market. In the course of their conversations with buyers in China, Beko marketers learned that many people hold fast to a cultural tradition that uses direct sunlight to dry clothes. Some Chinese believe there is a spiritual component when garments are exposed to the sun. So rather than throw in the towel (so to speak), Beko dryers were built with a setting that stops the drying cycle when it is only half done. Now Beko consumers can partially dry their wet laundry and then hang the slightly damp clothing in the sunlight.
Scott reports that the new Beko dryers are just one of their appliances that are selling very well in the Chinese market. Chinese buyer interviews led Beko to design a refrigerator that is very different from those routinely sold in Western countries. As almost everyone knows, rice is part of the daily Chinese diet. Without the research, however, Beko might not have known that their buyers wanted a refrigerator that could store rice at low humidity and a temperature of 10 degrees Celsius, a setting that's too warm for conventional refrigerated food. So Beko's Chinese model has three doors instead of the familiar two, each with separate temperature and humidity controls. Scott reported that “at the 2013 IFA Fair, the world's leading trade show for consumer electronics and home appliances, this Beko refrigerator won a coveted innovation award.”
Luckily, most marketers don't have to confront cultural factors as unusual as those that affected the introduction of Apple and Beko's products in Asia. But the essential concern – the importance of focusing on the concerns and expectations of your buyers – remains a crucial issue for all marketers, even those whose buyers live right next door. And admittedly, for many marketers their buyers' mind-sets can be as mysterious as the customs of citizens living in a foreign country.
It wasn't necessary for Apple and Beko to engage the methodology behind building buyer personas to avoid stumbling in their new markets. Some basic old-fashioned consumer market research was involved. But the fact that Beko undertook a concerted effort to interview their prospective Chinese customers demonstrates the wisdom of a disciplined approach to gathering insights into buyer expectations.
Most buying decisions are not as easily understood as those in the Apple iPhone and Beko examples. Many buying decisions are far more complex, involving many variables and multiple influencers or decision makers. Geographic distinctions may or may not alter the buyer's approach to the decision. And product design modifications are an uncommon result of building buyer personas.
However, the most crucial aspect of buyer personas applies to each of these stories: The companies involved needed to listen to their buyers tell a story about a considered decision.
We will explore other circumstances and approaches in Chapter 3, but the most effective way to build buyer personas is to interview buyers who have previously weighed their options, considered or rejected solutions, and made a decision similar to the one you want to influence. Unfortunately, many marketers don't realize that hearing and relating their customer's story is the foundation of understanding them as a buyer. So it's essential to clearly define what a buyer persona is – and what it is not.
In some marketing courses and websites, buyer personas are defined as something similar to Figure 1.1.
Figure 1.1 Example Buyer Profile
Here we see Jim, a fictional archetype who is meant to represent a typical operations manager. The graphic outline gives us information about Jim's education, age, to whom he reports, his skills, the incentives and rewards from his job (keeping his job and an occasional raise), and how he spends his free time (family, church, a weekly poker game with his friends); plus how he stays current on the latest trends in his industry, broken down into four categories. This is a Buyer Profile that is heavy on data that could be readily gleaned from online sources.
What does this tell us about how Jim makes a buying decision? We see he reads industry publications, belongs to industry trade groups, and uses the Internet when searching for solutions. Alas, the same could be said for about 99 percent of other business professionals working at a comparable managerial level.
Let's say Jim is looking for a new logistics management supplier. From this template,
