Extract: Who are you really marketing to? Understanding the buying group

It may not appear so when looking at the timeline of many social media feeds, but in marketing, everything starts with the customer… Marketing is all about finding, getting and keeping the customer. But who is the customer? If it is not defined well, marketers might end up chasing all the wrong people. What a waste of time, not to mention money.

Knowing exactly who the customer is forms the foundation on which marketing plans are built. And you know what they say about building on a weak foundation. I don’t have an exact quote either, but there must be something about things falling if built on a weak foundation. Knowing the target customer is the first step and yet, no matter how obvious it looks, it is not a straightforward task.

Typically, there are three roles connected to buying anything: Using, Buying and Influencing.

Let me explain with a few examples. Say you are in the check-out line in a grocery store. While you wait, you see some Cadbury Eclairs on a shelf. Just a glimpse and you feel like spoiling yourself. No one in the family—nor your gym trainer—will know that you cheated on your diet. The sneaky Cadbury sales team has kept it there for exactly this purpose. You buy it and eat it (after paying for it, of course). No one else is involved. It’s just you. You are the user and the buyer.

Now imagine it’s another day. You are in a similar line with a friend, Pesky, and you see the same Eclairs. But as you are about to pick it up, the pesky person says, ‘Why don’t you buy a KitKat? We can break it and share it between us.’ Now, you hate KitKat. And you don’t like to share, especially with Pesky. And you really want that Eclairs. But to get her off your back and avoid being branded as a selfish person in your WhatsApp group, you cave in. What happened? You have been influenced by someone else. You are still the user and buyer, but the influencer is another person.

And lastly, you want to pick up a present for Pesky’s birthday. You hate her, so thousands of calories wrapped in chocolate is exactly what she deserves. Personally, you would go with something cheap. But other friends will be present, so you buy a box of Ferrero Rocher because it feels more premium. You are only the buyer. The user is Pesky. And influencer? It’s society at large that you are concerned about, which influenced your purchase.

I mention these examples to illustrate the different roles played by different people in the purchase of a product. There are buyers, users and influencers. As we have just seen, they can all be the same or different. Let’s look at some more examples.

In my house, I shop for all my groceries on BigBasket. But I neither decide the brands, nor do I actually use many of the items being purchased. The cook provides me with a list of groceries to buy. She is the user. My wife recommends the brands to buy. She is the influencer. I merely go online, place the order and pay for it. I am the buyer. Of course, sometimes I sneak in a couple of items of my own, and for these I am the buyer, influencer and user. …

Sometimes, brands will create a pressure point by targeting a specific group of influencers who can then persuade the buyer or decision-maker. Children are one obvious such influencer group. ... They can put a lot of emotional pressure on the parents to get their kids what they want, just to shut them up. This is why, around the world, there are now laws restricting, if not prohibiting, ads targeted at kids.

Typically, when we look at customers, we need to think of them as a Buying Group that comprises the User, the Buyer and the Influencer. As we have seen in the examples above, they don’t need to be three different people. Sometimes all three are the same, as in the case of the decadent Eclairs before Pesky showed up. Sometimes they are three different people, as in the case of groceries. Understanding each person’s distinct motivations is important to get a brand into the shopping basket.

While the user group is nearly always easily identifiable, it is not often immediately obvious who plays the role of influencer and perhaps decider. Yet, for any decision to be made, these three roles are critical. Therefore, as a marketer, it is fundamental that the buying group is identified right at the start of the strategy process. What the marketer says to each of these people may need to be different, because their concerns are usually different. Someone may be primarily interested in the price, someone else in the aesthetics, another in the brand image, yet another in the featured film star or model and so on. Consequently, different communication triggers will need to be used to make marketing most effective. Before digital channels came along, a marketer’s life was easy. Media choices were limited. The same few TV channels, print, newspapers. Whatever the product, the media plans were largely the same, since it was hard to monitor audience behaviour. You could swap the media plan for a sanitary napkin with that for a loaf of bread, and no one would know. Since digital media arrived, that gig is up. It is now extremely possible to create communication targeted at extremely specific groups.

Edited excerpt from Digital Marketing for Non-Marketers: An Irreverent Guide published with permission from Westland Business.