On Walking a Mile in Your Customer’s Moccasins

When Mary T. Lathrap penned her 1895 poem espousing that we “walk a mile in his moccasins," she was encouraging us to “judge others softly.” Not to detract from the importance of accepting others and reserving judgment in these polarized times, but there is another more commercial benefit to empathy. Truly understanding the needs, challenges, and motivations of your customer is a critical prerequisite to building capabilities and products to meet their demands.

Top tier Consumer Goods companies invest healthy research budgets to understand the consumer’s perspective, with Attitude and Usage trackers, ethnographic studies, decision trees, attitudinal segmentations and the like. We’ve long know these to be critical foundations to building genuine differentiation and consumer loyalty.

But too few manufacturers seek to actively learn what is motivating their retail customers. If anything, that is viewed as a tactical exercise solely in the purview of the account executive. Perhaps they have a system for tracking the knowledge over time, but the quality of the inputs is dependent upon sales people who are primarily incented on revenue, not insight management, and not necessarily accessible by the rest of the organization.

Some more advanced companies have a retail advisory board, do listening tours or better yet conduct quantitative and qualitative surveys of their customers, using these insights to understand where they stack up relative to competition across a variety of attributes and capabilities. Some will even use the knowledge developed over time to drive capability development prioritization and customer segmentation. (Read more about this here)

But the occasional manufacturer values their customers enough to build their viewpoint into the Long-Range Planning process at the executive level. I recently led a client’s executive team through a two-day workshop designed to give all the division presidents and functional heads a view of the future through the lens of their most important customers.

Each executive was immediately relieved of his or her current duties and given a short-term contract as Chief Strategy Officer for a specific retail customer, charged with identifying the retailer’s key strategic issues for the next 3-5 years. We then had futurist speakers address the group highlighting emerging trends in the areas of Consumer, Competitor, Channel, Category, Economy and Technology. The participants looked at the future not as Division President or EVP of Supply Chain, but rather as the strategic leader of a major retail chain.

After letting the retailer’s future percolate over dinner and a night’s sleep, each executive worked to identify the burning issues that would be keeping the retailer up over the next few years, and how they might look to address them. Sharing these perspectives across retailers, we tabulated the commonalities and range of real problems that these important customers would be facing.

After being hired back into their manufacturer roles, the team then tackled the ways that they could address these retailer issues, and prioritized the internal steps necessary to become indispensable to addressing their customers’ meatiest challenges. This work served as a foundational element in the organization’s LRP process, informed Mission / Vision / Purpose statements and identified opportunities they would’ve never seen had they not walked a mile in their customer’s moccasins.

One client commented that the process was enlightening and game-changing. “Instead of brainstorming how our products and capabilities could solve general retailer problems, like we usually do, we determined what specific retailers’ future problems would be then figured out how we could help them address those issues. There are some very different topics on our LRP agenda now that will give us an edge over the next five years.”

Just putting on the customer’s moccasins can change your view of the future, and how you can make it better.

For more information on how we can help you understand your customer or consumer, call Bob Hilarides at 847 917 5121 or visit www.KnowledgeAmp.com.