How to Align Your Brand Strategy to Unmet Customer Needs

What’s the Data Say?

According to PwC, 26% of consumers stopped using or buying a product in 2021 for various reasons, most likely because of a negative customer experience. On the other hand, 82% of consumers would be open to sharing personal data with brands in exchange for a better customer experience. So, it’s a win-win for brands that can meet customer needs and provide a positive customer experience.

Meeting customer needs is like trying to guess what is relevant and what isn’t to a group of people that you don’t know. For example, when I was in the market to refinance my home a few years ago, I was targeted by advertisers in my Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, Google search results, and more. The ads followed me everywhere.

I noticed every billboard, commercial, podcast, and radio ad. I overheard conversations in the grocery store, the office, and other public places when “refinance” was used. Off the top of my head, I could tell you the interest rate of every bank and credit union for a 30-year fixed mortgage.

This was my need. I needed to find the best interest rate possible for my current situation. Interestingly, the minute I closed escrow on my refinance, I stopped noticing the ads, conversations, billboards, etc. The reality is that they were still there, but the “refinance” messaging did not meet my needs any longer. It was no longer relevant.

They say that the customer is always right. Not sure I agree with that, but let’s go with it for this post. Marketers need to understand what customers want and quickly respond to their needs. With big data becoming more readily available, there are now more ways than ever for a brand to acquire customer feedback and use it to improve the customer experience and products they introduce into the market.

It’s no secret that meeting customer needs should be the primary focus of any marketing or corporate communications strategy. However, understanding those needs can be difficult because they constantly change. And as soon as you think you’ve figured them out, they change again. Therefore, consumer brands, B2B, and technology firms must continue innovating because meeting customer needs must be a priority.

What are Customer Needs?

Customer needs are the psychological, emotional, and physical motivations that encourage a customer to take action and buy a product or service. That “reason to believe” or customer need becomes the reason for purchasing.

For example, a customer’s need develops once a decision is made to purchase a new vehicle. Perhaps the existing car has ongoing engine trouble and is becoming too expensive to fix every six months. Gas prices might be a factor. Or, maybe a teenager at home just got their license. Whatever the reason, the customer needs is buy a new car. The car type, make, model, color, used, unique, and leasing options will determine how customers satisfy their needs. It’s up to companies and brands to uncover the customer’s unmet needs and reach them with relevant content, messaging, and ads.

Why Does a Business Need to Understand Customer Needs?

Brands must understand what their customers want and stay ahead of the competition. This can be done through a market analysis, which involves collecting audience data about potential and current customers. Once a business has this data, it can use insights to inform brand messaging or product development. This is crucial in meeting customers’ unmet needs and maintaining long-term business growth.

When brands don’t understand their customers’ needs, they risk losing them to a competitor. By understanding customer needs, they can develop a product or service that meets those needs to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Businesses must understand what customers expect from the brands they buy from. The first step of this process is identifying customer needs.

What is a Customer Needs Analysis?

A customer needs analysis is a process used to identify and document the actions required to improve a product or service from the customer’s perspective. This analysis ensures that the final product, service, or customer experience will meet customer needs.

Most brands use a customer needs analysis at some stage in product development. Still, it is also helpful in other areas, such as market analysis, sales, and customer service.

How to do a Customer Needs Analysis & Why is it Important?

There are several ways that brands can conduct a customer needs analysis. This includes primary research, surveys, interviews, focus groups, and customer feedback.

Once the data is collected, it is essential to analyze it and identify patterns and trends of what customers want, expect, and why they purchase. This will provide actionable insights for marketers to make data-driven decisions about what products or services to offer and how to market them to various audiences.

The most crucial part of identifying customer needs is acting on the findings. B2B brands need to implement these changes to create value and meet the needs of their customers, however minor they may be. This might involve product innovation, changing how they price their products or services, or altering their digital marketing strategy.

Customer feedback is a crucial part of understanding customer needs. It allows brands to get direct feedback about what they like and don’t like, media preferences, unique interests, and characteristics. By collecting feedback, brands can better understand how to serve their customers and meet and exceed their needs and expectations.

How to Use Customer Feedback to Uncover Unmet Needs

There are many ways businesses can use customer feedback to uncover unmet needs. Here are some of the most common methods used to collect customer insights:

1. Online surveys: Brands can use online surveys to collect data and insights from customers about their experiences and satisfaction with a product or service. This feedback can improve the customer experience and make necessary changes to products or services.
2. Social media: Social media is a great way to collect real-time feedback. Customers often share their thoughts and opinions about products and services on social media, which can be helpful for businesses looking to improve their offerings.
3. In-person interviews: This approach allows a business to gather in-depth information about customers’ needs and motivations before and after purchasing.
4. Focus groups: A focus group is qualitative research involving a small group of customers (typically 8-12) who are asked about their opinions on a product, service, or specific brand. This type of customer research can help understand purchase behavior throughout the customer journey.
5. Industry trends. A business must stay up-to-date on industry trends, cultural developments, and societal issues. This helps them anticipate changes in customer needs and deliver educational customer experiences.
6. Audience Analysis: Audience insights are a powerful way to identify customer needs, especially directly from what customers post on social media. By analyzing customer data, businesses can identify trends and patterns to improve the customer experience or new products they introduce into the marketplace.

Understanding the Common Types of Customer Needs

Identifying customer needs should be the foundation of your marketing approach. So, it’s essential to understand what makes your customers tick. If you can identify your customer’s needs, you’ll be better equipped to convert them into paying customers.

Many of these will be familiar if you have read Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

1. The basics are the needs that must be met for a customer to survive. They include food, water, shelter, and clothing.
2. Safety: Customers want to feel safe and secure in their personal and professional lives. They need to know that you will protect them and their information. This applies to car manufacturers, airlines, and even social media companies that access customer data.
3. Belonging and Love: Customers need to feel like they belong and love. They need to feel accepted by you and your company.
4. Self-esteem: Customers need to feel important and valued. They need to know that you think they are worth your time and attention.
5. Self-actualization: Customers need to feel like they are achieving their personal and professional goals. They need to know that you are helping them reach their potential somehow. Brands like Nike reinforce this messaging with their products and customer experience.
6. Functional: Customers need your product or service to work the way they need to solve their problems. This is highly applicable to B2B and technology companies.
7. Social: Customers need to interact with other people. They need to know that you are a business that values human connection. Dating apps, social networks, and local companies have the opportunity to deliver against this need.
8. Emotional: Customers need to feel positive emotions. They need to know that you are a company that cares about them and their feelings.
9. Mental: Customers need to stimulate their minds. They need to know that you are a company that is innovative and forward-thinking.
10. Spiritual: Customers need to feel connected to something bigger than themselves. They need to know that you are a company that values meaning and purpose.
11. Creative: Customers need to be creative in their personal and professional lives.
12. Hedonic: Customers need to feel pleasure in their personal and professional lives. They need to know that you are a company that provides excellent customer experiences.
13. Nutritional: Customers need to be healthy in their personal and professional lives. They need to know that you are a company that provides healthy products and services.
14. Environmental: Customers want to feel like they are doing their part to protect the environment. They need to know that you are an environmentally responsible and socially conscious company.
15. Economic: Customers want good value for their money. They need to know that you are a fair and honest company in your pricing with quality products.
16. Political: Customers want to know that they support a company that aligns with their political beliefs. They need to know that you are a company that shares their values.

Any brand or business that can identify customer needs and map its marketing strategies to the customer journey will be destined to see long-term success and growth.

How to Respond to Customer Needs

Successfully responding to customer needs requires a thoughtful strategy and concerted effort. Here are some best practices for companies seeking to understand and address their customers’ priorities deeply:

Foster Sincerity in All Interactions

Authenticity is critical – customers can instantly detect insincerity. Every customer touchpoint should focus on developing genuine connections, from sales calls to social media engagement. Avoid scripted language and corporate-speak. Instead, communicate in a real, human way that demonstrates true interest in customers’ perspectives.

Sincere listening is the foundation. Let customers share without interrupting. Ask thoughtful follow-up questions that show care for their unique situation. Validate emotions expressed even when unable to offer immediate solutions. Companies reinforce their commitment to customers’ best interests by leading with empathy and compassion.

Make Listening a Priority

Listening is an art – when done well, customers feel heard and understood. Set aside assumptions and fully concentrate on customers’ words, needs, and body language. Reflect on key points to confirm understanding. Capture feedback through surveys, interviews, and other tools to quantify insights.

Listen even when the feedback may be critical or uncomfortable. Remaining open-minded rather than defensive demonstrates respect. Collective listening across functions and departments provides a holistic view of pain points. Absorbing customer perspectives guides more relevant product and service enhancements.

Respond Rapidly and Effectively

Customers value speedy resolution to inquiries. Establish processes and prepare staff to handle various issues efficiently. Empower representatives to make judgment calls to solve problems on the spot when feasible. For more complex matters, lay out next steps and timeline expectations upfront.

Technology can assist with rapid response – use chatbots, help ticketing systems, and call/email routing to quickly connect customers with the right agent. Monitor and optimize response metrics like time-to-resolution. Prompt, thoughtful, complete responses reinforce a customer-first commitment.

Remain Flexible to Evolving Needs

Regularly adapt offerings to align with customers’ changing needs and preferences. Use feedback to identify areas for innovation and features that may be underutilized. Willingness to adjust rather than rigid adherence to the status quo is key.

Balance flexibility with avoiding over-customization that increases complexity and costs. Focus on modifications that solve high-priority needs first. Champion agility throughout organizational culture, processes, and systems to respond rapidly. Frame flexibility as an ongoing partnership with customers throughout evolving journeys.

Deliver Valuable Solutions

Providing tailored solutions demonstrates a deep understanding of customers’ unique situations. Avoid one-size-fits-all approaches – recognize each customer has specific struggles needing customized resolution. Offer a mix of general suggestions along with ideas personalized to their needs.

Back solutions with expertise and evidence on why the approach can work. Provide implementation support rather than just ideas. Focus solutions on helping customers achieve their goals versus pushing products. Blend education, advice, and instruction to equip customers to address issues now and in the future.

Using Intent-based Social Conversation to Find Customer Needs

Consumers today are not shy about telling the world which products they plan on buying or have just purchased. Even if you don’t have a social listening platform, you can do a native search for keywords like “going to buy,” “just bought,” or “thinking about getting a” coupled with a product name, and you would be surprised at what you’d find.

Twitter is great for starting your search because the platform is conversational. You can understand what people say about a product, service, or brand.

Innovate Your Product Lifecycle Using a Customer Needs Analysis

The product life cycle is a model that illustrates when a product is brought to the market and introduced to consumers until it either goes away, innovates, or pivots into something new. It’s broken down into four stages—introduction, growth, maturity, and decline.

To innovate your product life cycle, you must understand your customers’ needs. What are they looking for? What are their pain points? What do they want from a product or service? These questions can be answered by doing a customer needs analysis.

Once you understand what your customers want and need, you can innovate your product or service to meet those needs. This will help you stay ahead of the competition and keep your customers happy.

It’s not too difficult to map social conversations to each product lifecycle stage. It’s similar to mapping conversations to the purchase funnel, which is smart and can inform a B2B social strategy. This also plays well into product innovation, a core driver and byproduct of a customer advocacy program.

Uncover Trends in Customer Needs Using Percent Change

Tracking customer needs over time using percent change reveals instructive trends for shaping business strategy and product offerings. Companies can ensure alignment between what customers want and the solutions provided by continually monitoring this vital data.

The Power of Percent Change

Calculating the percent change in customer needs to be mentioned from one period to the next quantifies increases or decreases. For example, say a feature request is mentioned by 5% of surveyed customers in January and then by 10% in February. The percent change would be:

(Newer value – Original value) / Original value x 100

(10 – 5) / 5 x 100 = 100% increase

Sharp rises may indicate an emerging high-priority need warranting attention. Declines may signal waning interest where resources could be reallocated. Even smaller fluctuations can reveal trend shifts.

Applying Insights Strategically

Uncovering changes in customer needs prompts informed product and marketing decisions. If a desired feature sees major growth, adding it becomes a priority. Decreasing demand for another capability may justify scaling back investments there.

But percentages alone don’t tell the whole story. Additional factors like customer revenue value, retention risks, and development costs help determine appropriate responses. Still, percent change is a powerful early indicator of evolving priorities.

Tracking Topics Broadly

The technique applies beyond product features to track many aspects of customer needs. For example, percent change over time can spotlight:

• Changing preferences between product tiers
• Shifts in desired brand attributes
• Increasing/decreasing interest in content topics
• Emerging challenges faced by customers

For B2B, tracking technology terms like “AI” reveals when adoption reaches critical mass. In B2C, pre- and post-election topics mention uncovering shifting political priorities.

Maintaining a Pulse on Velocity

While identifying upward or downward trends is invaluable, the speed of change also matters greatly. A spike in interest over one week versus gradual shifts measured over a full year should prompt different responses. Regular tracking provides perspective on velocity – how fluid or stable are customer needs?

Measuring the rate of change, or velocity, involves comparing the percent change between multiple periods rather than just two data points. For example:

• Week 1 to Week 2: 3% increase
• Week 2 to Week 3: 15% increase
• Week 3 to Week 4: 34% increase

Here, the rate of change is accelerating rapidly week-over-week, indicating a skyrocketing need. On the other hand:

• Month 1 to Month 2: 5% increase
• Month 2 to Month 3: 3% increase
• Month 3 to Month 4: 1% increase

This shows interest slowing over several months, suggesting a mature or declining market.

Monitoring both percentage change and velocity of change in customer needs provides direction. Companies can confidently steer toward growing priorities and sail away from receding tides before wasting resources. Major realignment may be prudent when the pace of change dramatically quickens.

Above all, regularly embracing the measurement of trends and velocity provides a competitive advantage to those attuned to the voice of the customer. The metrics serve as guiding stars through all market conditions.

Final Thoughts on Anticipating Customer Needs

Understanding customer needs is critical for brands of all sizes. By aligning their brand strategy with unmet customer needs, brands can differentiate themselves from their competitors and better meet the needs of their target market. There are many ways that organizations can use customer feedback to uncover unmet needs, including online surveys, social media, in-person interviews, and focus groups.

Additionally, brands can keep up with industry trends, conduct market research, listen to customers, and use data analysis to understand customer needs better. By asking questions, businesses can get to the root of their customers’ needs, develop products or services that meet them, and communicate that value through an integrated PESO marketing strategy.

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