Grace is 32 years old, she has worked hard to establish herself on the career ladder and bought her first home. Grace and her partner Mike are trying for a baby. As marketers with a brand story to tell we’re in a hurry to gather as much data as we can about Grace. We want to know her postcode, where she shops and what she chooses. We want to know how much she earns and how many people live in her household. Of course, there are companies, algorithms and applications that can filter this data for us.
But even as we’re paying attention to the data, we may be missing opportunities to serve Grace and tell a story that resonates with her because of what we don’t know.
We don’t know why she can’t wash her hands without glancing in the bathroom mirror, or what makes her wear impossibly high shoes on Friday night—the kind that leave her wearing Band-Aids on the backs of her heels for a week.
We haven’t worked out why she often buys flowers for friends when her own vase is rarely full.
We don’t understand the reason she unscrews the fabric softener bottle in the supermarket aisle to smell the fragrance, or why she wishes her hair was less of what it is and more of what someone else’s seems to be.
We haven’t discerned why she believes raw chocolate is worth paying four times more for, or why she stopped buying magazines but loses herself for an hour on Pinterest every night.
We are not wondering why she needs to be seen to “have it all”, or who she trusts and how they earned it.
How is it that we can know so much and so little all at once?
What don’t you know about your customers? Go deeper.
Image by Sascha Kohlmann.