Consumer Profiling Helps Houston Businesses Attract & Retain Customers

Kronman Research, a marketing intelligence services firm explains technique

In today’s competitive global marketplace, attracting and retaining customers can prove to be a difficult feat. For every one business, there is a competitor offering the same product or one closely similar; giving consumers a wide array of options where it pertains to certain products or services. Pleasing these consumers and recruiting new business is chief in the business world, as more likely than not the company’s financial stability depends upon it. In order to gain better insight into the types of customers they have, and identify potential customers, many businesses are turning to a mainstream technique utilized by marketers called consumer profiling.

Consumer profiling refers to the process of using relevant and available information to describe the characteristics of a group of customers to identify their discriminators from other customers or ordinary customers for their purchasing decisions.

If conducted correctly, consumer profiling should address questions such as:

• What do they buy?

• Where can I find more prospects similar to the most valuable customers?

• How do they spend money inside of their household? How much of it is allocated to services or products that I provide?

• What are the major demographic attributes of my customers?

• Why do they purchase my goods or services?

It is important to note that there are two types of customer profiling: abstract and personal. Abstract profiling refers to an extraction form a large volume of data of an “abstract profile” of a class or person. This is followed by a comparison of a database of personal data about large numbers of people in order to identify potential customers. On the contrary, personal profiling refers to accumulation, acquisition and cross referencing of data about individuals, sometimes combines with geo-demographic data; followed by its use for various micromarketing purposes.

So how exactly does one conduct customer profiling?

• First, identify the characteristics you will use in your profile.

• Second, begin building a basic customer profile based on the initial characteristics. This involves entering customers into a spreadsheet referred to as a customer profiling worksheet. This generally is the best way to group and broadly compare customers.

• Third, narrow down the first list of characteristics to the most essential traits that make a profitable customer. From her it is important to prioritize major characteristics as primary and secondary respectively.

• Finally, evaluate each customer on the key characteristics. This involves the use of a matrix, or a table with customers listed along the left side of the table, and key characteristics grouped by primary and secondary status along the top. At this point, rate customers on each characteristic with the highest score being the best. Primary characteristics can potentially have a higher value than secondary characteristics. Add the scores for each customer to get the total outcome. The highest total should indicate your most valuable customers based on the chosen characteristics. The lowest should indicate less profitable customers.

For more information on customer profiling or other marketing and information research solutions, please contact Kronman Research at 713-410-1749 or visit their website, www.kronmanresearch.com.