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Knowing your customers is the single most important business superpower:
Many brands already know this in theory.
And still, they aren’t able to harness the power of knowing their customers.
Instead, they’re satisfied with doing a bit of market research and running a few focus groups — essentially, collecting a bunch of opinions.
But to really get under the skin of your customers, you need to be able to read the values that are expressed in those opinions.
That’s what this article is all about.
Customer reviews are treasure troves of insight:
There’s only one downside — and it’s important to bear in mind.
Reviews tend to represent the more extreme poles of the customer happiness spectrum (source). People who feel indifferent about something are usually less inclined to leave a review, so you’ll end up with lots of enthusiasm on the one hand and a lot of scathing criticism on the other.
Depending on your industry, you’ll want to look at one of the following 7 sources:
For more concrete ideas, download this handy list of places to check out (opens in Dropbox).
Are you a techie?
You could crawl customer reviews automatically to find the features that people talk about. That’s what Minqing Hu and Bing Liu did in their study about Mining and Summarizing Customer Reviews.
Not your thing?
Don’t worry: you can always go through the reviews manually.
To get some valuable insights into your market and your ideal customers’ likes and dislikes, you needn’t even read all available reviews (some products have tens of thousands of them).
Just remember to use additional sources of information for context.
For example, you could interview 5-10 customers or read customer care conversations.
This is another one of Hu and Liu’s methods.
It’s a clever way to keep things tidy.
The important thing is to record comments as they appear, so you capture the customer verbatim with all its emotional expressiveness. The easiest way to do that is by copy/pasting their comments into a spreadsheet, like so:
Once you’ve got a nice collection of comments, it’s time to dig into the details.
Look for the adjectives and adverbs: words such as cute or fast or impressive.
For example, let’s have a look at this review for Where Does It Come From?
“Just wanted to let you know how thrilled I am with my son’s jeans!
I’m very impressed with how soft they are and such a fab colour!
It was lovely to talk through the process of how his jeans were made – very special.
And loving the adjustable waist – perfect for this growing boy!
Thank you for being so helpful and I look forward to seeing more from Where Does It Come From?”
This customer is really happy about the jeans they bought for their son. If we highlight the descriptive words, we’ll see at a glance what matters to this customer:
Pay attention to how people describe the products they’ve bought from you and their experience. Their descriptions will show you what they really value, and what’s worth highlighting in your marketing.
You can even use their exact words to make sure your message resonates.
I first came across this advice in former hostage negotiator Richard Mullender’s eye-opening book, Dispelling the Myths and Rediscovering the Lost Art of Listening.
Whenever you see one of these words, Mullender recommends paying extra attention to the action following it — because it’s particularly important to that person.
Let’s consider the following example, taken from Boho Homes London.
This is a company that sells beautiful artisanal homewares, made by social enterprises and Fairtrade suppliers in Asia.
One of their customers bought this stunning temple for their home:
Here’s their review.
I’ve highlighted the motivators in bold text and underlined the important points that follow them:
Apparently, this temple is quite a bit bigger than the one on the website, and it was especially imported for this customer. Therefore, it seems that the size of the temple really mattered to him or her.
It’s interesting, too, that this customer talks about future purchases as a decision — emphasising the rational aspect of the purchase.
The fact that the “range” is mentioned points to a desire to match their home decor.
Words like very, really, truly, incredibly add extra oomph to the words that follow them.
Any comments that contain an emphasizer deserve your special attention.
Sustainable tailors, Gillian June, make bespoke ethical women’s wear.
Here’s a review from a happy customer:
Once again, I’ve put the emphasizers in bold font and underlined what follows.
This immediately draws our attention to the most important aspects of the jacket in the eyes of this customer:
It’s always interesting to check which of these aspects come up a few times in different people’s reviews. Those are the ones you want to focus on in your marketing. They can also guide your product development in a customer-friendly and therefore sustainable way.
Let’s go back to Richard Mullender’s advice.
According to his experience, a person who says someone’s “loud and aggressive” is really telling you that they don’t like loud and aggressive people. Equally, a person describing someone else as “friendly” reveals that they like to be treated as a friend. They like people to be nice.
While this may sound blatantly obvious, it’s all too easy to skim over a customer review and overlook the rich detail it contains.
Each word matters — allow yourself to really dig into each review and savour each expression for what it reveals about your customers’ preferences.
Hearing the unsaid is an art and a skill at the same time.
One helpful technique is simply to ask, “what do people not talk about in these reviews?”
For example, let’s assume you’re looking at reviews of mobile phones.
Think about your product or service and all the things that people could, in theory, comment on. What are people actually talking about — and what comes up rarely?
If people aren’t commenting on the price, then it doesn’t seem to be all that important. That’s good to know because it helps you set your prices with more confidence.
Another useful technique comes from root cause analysis: take a single statement in a review, and ask “why” seven times.
Let’s apply this technique to the adjustable kids’ jeans in our previous example:
“Just wanted to let you know how thrilled I am with my son’s jeans!
I’m very impressed with how soft they are and such a fab colour! It was lovely to talk through the process of how his jeans were made – very special.
And loving the adjustable waist – perfect for this growing boy!
Thank you for being so helpful and I look forward to seeing more from Where Does It Come From?”
Asking seven times Why? means that we have to make an effort to empathise with the customer.
As a reward, we arrive at a much deeper understanding of what’s going on in that person’s head.
When you ask seven times Why?, some of your answers will be conjecture.
To validate your ideas, you can interview customers (in this case, parents buying jeans for their kids).
Now you’re ready to use your discoveries strategically in your own marketing.
You’ll probably have ended up with reams and reams of insights, and you’ll want to prioritise them in your marketing. Don’t explore too many directions all at once — instead, it pays off to stay laser focused on the right messages.
To find that all-important focus, I recommend you prioritise according to the 3 Rs: Really, Reach, Resonate.
What was emphasised in the reviews? (Look out for words like really, truly, utterly, etc. They show you what people respond to emotionally.)
This has a double meaning:
Which insights resonate most with you? After all, it’s important that you feel that people love (or reject!) your offers for the right reasons.
And finally, I want to leave you with one of my favourite quotes:
So, if you see a lot of complaints about something, consider prioritising that aspect in your marketing, if you can. Especially if those negative comments refer to competitors’ products.
As a straightforward example, think about the fight to reduce single-use plastic packaging.
People are complaining about plastic packaging right now — fortunately!
If your products are plastic-free, or packaged in recycled or reusable plastic, then that’s an easy win for you.
Or, to give you another example — in my own business as a copywriter, I noticed lots of companies complaining about “flaky”, unorganised copywriters who didn’t stick to deadlines.
That’s why I decided to polish my project management skills even more, hire a coordinator and emphasise a sense of reliability in my marketing.
That’s what value-based marketing is all about: taking people’s opinions, digging deeper and ask why they hold the opinions they share. Why does it really matter to them? How can you help them improve their lives with your products?
As you write your website copy, product descriptions and newsletters, make sure you use the customers’ own words as much as possible.
If that’s not an option for some reason, look at the unspoken values you uncovered through asking “Why?” and speak about them.
Using this approach, you can go beyond the traditional, superficial advertising of your product. It’s also easier to build a supportive atmosphere among brands in the same industry, because each brand can reach different people’s minds and hearts.