Who is the customer?

How saying what you do and doing what you say influences customers, partners, staff and investors alike, and has a direct impact on the bottom line.

Issues

 The company was struggling against global competitors with stronger brand recognition. It had forgotten how to innovate and was failing to make itself heard even amongst its more loyal clients and even when it had a good story to tell.
  • Customer attrition
  • Battle-weary and reactive technical direction
  • Bean-counting culture
  • Lack of leadership

Objectives

 The initial brief was to understand why some of the company's biggest and best customers were going elsewhere. Subsequent agreed objectives were to:
  • Understand the buying audience
  • Understand their industries better
  • Identify the perceptions and aspirations of the target audience
  • Assess these against the operational reality
  • and Close the gaps

Programmes

 The programme we devised consisted of an independent and anonymous survey of recently lost clients to discover what had changed. Based on the evidence we found, follow-up work revolved around:
  • audience analysis
  • path to purchase research and analysis
  • finance industry requirements analysis and concept validation
  • messaging

Output

Remedial output required internal management as well as liaison with other third party suppliers in project management, press relations, inbound marketing and technology. Specifically, this incorporated:

  • Validation of development plans
  • Validation of marketing communications concepts, plans and collateral
  • 120 documented client interviews
  • Qualitative business process information and analysis
  • Quantitative requirements data and analysis
  • PR and Inbound Marketing agency briefings

Action

Our interventions and recommendations has lead to:

  • Increased investment and accelerated development plans
  • Industry issues and trends-driven PR
  • Business buyer focussed inbound marketing programme
    • audience persona development
    • business requirements-driven content
  • Sales database improvements
  • New corporate positioning
  • One strategic acquisition

Success

 New found:
  • Direction
  • Focus
  • Motivation
  • Customer engagement
  • Growth

 

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