Step 2: know your customers
It is, of course, important to know the customers of a brand when developing marketing strategies and activities, and much has been written about how to do it. The purpose of this chapter is, however, to give some key guidelines and perspectives on how to do this as part of developing a customized brand.
The simple answer to this question is: 'How can one do without it?' However, that is not a particularly enlightening answer.
Every business needs to know its customers to be able to serve them in the right way. It is not possible to conclude what people want without proper knowledge. The standard and amount of customer knowledge differs considerably from industry to industry. A bank or a retailer has the potential to know more than a supplier of cucumbers or copperwire to the consumer market does.
Even within the same industry there are considerable differences in the level of customer knowledge. In retailing Tesco knows a lot more than the discount chain Netto, British Airways know more than the low-price airline Ryanair. This has nothing necessarily to do with ability but with business strategy. If the brand platform is based on a low price alone, most companies with that kind of strategy just wait for the bargain hunters to come, as the business model does not allow for customer analysis. On the other hand if the strategy is to have a
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