Mungo Dunnett Associates: Management and Marketing Consultancy

Customer Research

Background

Seeing yourself as your customers do

Many companies will swear that they have been in the business long enough to know exactly what their customers think and want. After all, they are frequently exposed to opinionated customers, and they meet their counterparts regularly at industry events and at social occasions. So what’s the problem?

The problem is that what senior management see and hear is not representative. You will hear the good news nearly all the time, but the bad news only some of the time. It’s also very unstructured: what opportunity have you to identify changing patterns of behaviour from a 2-minute discussion in the reception area? And, crucially, you won’t be getting the whole truth: not from your customers, not from the staff – and certainly not from your competitors. After all, would you tell them?

You don’t need to install a rolling programme of research. You aren’t IBM. But you do need to know, every few years, whether what you think is happening around you is the true story.

The following sections give an outline of the areas where it is essential that you have a better than anecdotal understanding of how your business is actually performing.