Being there with your customer was the message from both speakers at the last BOP Marketing Professionals event, Turning Consumer Insights into Real Bottom Line Sales, held at the Tauranga Chamber of Commerce. For one of the speakers it meant literally being where the customer is, and for the other it meant getting into the customer’s shoes, or in this case, bra.

Natalie Milne, Global Marketing Manager for Zespri, shared insights from their latest marketing campaigns worldwide, specifically Belgium, the Netherlands, and Asia. An interesting statistic she raised is that their ideal customer that eats kiwi fruit every day is only 5% of the market, but they consume 30% of the volume sold, demonstrating their need to promote though different markets and push product to new customers. Through customer research and having a locally-based marketing team, the strategies to promote Zespri quality and the health benefits of kiwi fruit could vary quite a bit.

In Europe the product was pushed through stores, websites, and health conferences, where in Asia, a 14-day challenge with rewards and celebrity sponsorship worked best. Having a local team means that they can have a firsthand look at the culture and language, but also the reasons why that local market would buy their product, and what the perceived health benefits were. The perception of kiwi fruit in various areas also differ, though research showed that what the customer said and their actual reason for purchasing could be quite different, meaning their customer understanding is not an exact science. For example, many would say that they enjoy kiwi fruit for the taste, quality, and vitamin C, but really bought it for the effects on digestion and bowel health.

David Bathgate, Head of Brand and Design for Comvita had recently returned from a d.school course at the Institute of Design at Stanford in California. He shared his method for applying design thinking to market research. Their team had worked through an innovation process for Victoria’s Secret lingerie stores. Their process was first to gain empathy for the customer, define insights from their observations, and brainstorm new ways for the customer to shop and interact with a store, and then to prototype and test those interactions. Using this process the team could gain understanding for the actual customer and how this differed from VS’s target customer, ie a real, full sized woman versus an airbrushed supermodel with wings.

Using their insights, they brainstormed, something David believes should be a wild and open ended process. As many ideas as possible should be explored, crazy but on topic, and they encouraged ideas from outsiders as well. After the brainstorm, ideas could be refined and toned down and translated into rough prototypes, from a layout design that would increase ease of use, to different methods of bra fitting, and how to increase customer confidence within the store. He stressed the importance of the prototypes being rough and cheap, something that you can allow to fail, and testing them on all kinds of customers. On tested these prototypes, they gained more empathy for and insights from test customers and their interactions with the new designs.

On returning to New Zealand, David was then able to apply the design thinking process gained at the d.school course to Comvita’s own marketing strategy, seeing the need to implement a tighter methodology and increase the understanding of design thinking within marketing.

The group then enjoyed a glass of wine and casual networking. I’ll look forward to their next events with Better by Design and TVNZ’s new CEO, Kevin Kenrick. Look out for the group on LinkedIn.