Consumers Needs And How To Trace Them

Steve Jobs once stated, “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You cannot start with the technology and try to figure out where you are going to sell it”. This means that in order for a product/company to be successful, you must identify customer’s needs, understand, and fulfill them.

So how do you understand a customer’s needs? First you must identify them. A customer need is a motive that prompts a customer to buy a product or service.

The most common types of customer needs are as follows:

Functionality: customers need your product or service to function the way they need in order to solve their problem/desire.

Price: customers have unique budgets

Convenience: your product or service needs to be a convenient solution

Design: the product or service needs a slick design to make it relatively easy to use.

Reliability: the product or service needs to be reliable for whenever the customer wants to use it.

Compatibility: the product or service needs to be compatible with other products your customer is already using.

Information: customers need information from the moment they start interacting with the brand to days and months after purchase.

Accessibility: customers need to be able to access your service and support teams.

How can these needs be identified?

Surveys help companies figure out their position and determine the needs of their potential consumers.

Questions in the survey can include:

- Questions about positive and negative word associations with your brand

- Questions asking customers to group your brand with similar and/or competing brands

- Questions comparing and sorting brands according to their preferences

From there, one can analyze the answers given and determine why a customer would buy your product. By this stage, companies are then able to identify customers wants and needs and come up with a proper plan for the product/service and its promotion.