Aligning Brand Profile To Your Customer Base
For FMCG companies understanding the brand profile of your customers is crucial. If your brand profile is misaligned or out of touch, it can have a severe impact. Inconsistencies across your marketing mix will impair your ability as a brand to communicate effectively with your target market. Accurate brand alignment is essential for growth.
Customer Profile – Brand Alignment
By understanding or placing the customer at the very centre of the decision-making process, brand and retailers can focus development and investment. Specifically on the elements of the shopper marketing mix which will lead to brand growth and market share. A customer profile, customer persona or tribe as they are sometimes described is a comprehensive description of your customers. These Personas cover information across demographics, geographic and psychographic characteristics.
Marketing Mix
The brand profile of your customers will determine pricing, promotion and point of sale strategies. Understanding who buys and uses your products is important for brands who need to align internal marketing and operational strategies. This insight enables companies to help drive sales growth and profitability. The more you understand your customers, the better you will be able to communicate with them. Understanding who they are and what they are interested in will inform and underpin how best to reach them.
Sizing the Opportunity
If you have a defined brand profile with socio demographics, it’s then possible to map look-alike consumers against the UK population.
This is crucial to size the opportunity by understanding how many people are aligned to your brand profile.
Prioritising Resource
Understanding your ideal target market and being able to pinpoint where you can find them, enables you to prioritise both resource and spend. This provides the means to focus on the areas, store and products that will provide a good return on investment. You can focus on areas that have a higher density of customers with a propensity to spend. You can focus your sales team on stores or outlets that have the potential to generate more revenue. Lastly your marketing & advertising can be focussed on the right products or services aligned to specific catchment areas.
Revisiting Your Brand Profile
In our experience, many companies start with a sense of their brand profile, which, over time alters due to market forces and new entrants into the marketplace. A perceived or gut feel brand profile can be dangerous, particularly if it’s not reconciled against sales figures . This can be overcome by verifying who is actually purchasing your products. If paying customers do not match your brand profile, then any internal operations will be misaligned creating poor efficiencies and productivity resulting in poor overall growth.
If your Brand isn’t Aligned Now Is The Time To Act
It’s a worthwhile exercise to cross check sales figures against social demographics to ensure that your brand profile matches actual sales performance. This analysis and insight will allow you to drive sales through improved communication strategy. Sizing the market potential can help your company to prioritise spend and resource for specific products, categories / outlets or even your distribution channels.
Brand alignment is essential for growth. Sizing the market available against your brand profile and provides you with the tools to create strategies that ‘maintain, defend or grow’ based on the potential available.
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