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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
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Buyer Personas summary
Adele Revella
How to Gain Insight into Your Customer’s Expectations, Align Your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business
17 mins
Topics
Table of Contents
Buyer Personas
Summary of 8 key ideas
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Key idea 1 of 8
Knowing your customer helps you provide them with what they’ll buy.
Imagine you’re selling sofas – big, expensive, cumbersome sofas. Now imagine you’ve taken your product around to tiny, high-rise rental apartments in the inner city. How many do you think you’ll sell? Probably none.
Not knowing your customers’ wants and needs is a recipe for disaster. So when you enter a new market, it’s important to conduct in-depth research to understand your customers.
If you don’t do your homework, your prized products may end up gathering dust instead of bringing in revenue. Surprisingly, this is exactly what happened to Apple when they launched the 3G iPhone in the Japanese market.
In 2007, Japanese consumers bought 5 million mobile phones. The following year, when Apple introduced their 3G phones, they sold only 200,000 units – a mere four percent of the Japanese market share – and sold mostly to established Apple users. So what caused this massive failure?
Japanese consumers were used to shooting videos and watching TV programs on their phones, and iPhone 3G didn’t even have a video camera! Apple failed to realize that buyers in the Japanese market had different needs than those in the US and Europe, and suffered for it.
To learn about your customers’ needs, you have to ask them directly. Unlike Apple, the Turkish-appliance company Beko conducted interviews with prospective customers before launching their dryer in the Chinese market.
As a result of these interviews, Beko’s marketing team learned that a large portion of Chinese consumers believe that “there is a spiritual component when garments are exposed to the sun.”
So Beko designed their dryers for the Chinese market by making it possible to stop the drying cycle halfway through, allowing customers to dry their garments in the sun. Their diligence was rewarded; Beko dryers are selling very well!
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What is Buyer Personas about?
It’s hard to sell to people that you don’t know. Buyer Personas (2015) gives you the tools you need to truly understand your customers – their motivations, their quirks, their reservations – so that you can fine-tune your messaging to become a maximally effective seller.
Best quote from Buyer Personas
As much as we may like to think of ourselves as open-minded, most peoples initial response to a new idea in resistance.
—Adele Revella
Who should read Buyer Personas?
- Marketing executives
- Company leaders who are looking for a product market
- Anyone who wants to be a better communicator
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