We’ve all experienced situations where we try to ask deep probing questions about customers’ relationship with our brand, and they look at us blankly with a response like “what do you mean?  I needed X, Brand Y’s product was good, so I bought it.  End of story.”

It can be good to remember that our customers’ lives don’t necessarily revolve around our brand… but there’s still more to it than the transaction described above!  How can we get a deeper understanding of the customer relationship?  I recently borrowed from an exercise used in life coaching to ask research participants about the values that are most important to them, and then asked about ways in which the brand helps them achieve those values.

Here’s how I presented the exercise:

Different things are important to different people.  Following is a list of needs.  You might say all of them are desirable or important… but if you had to choose just five, which five would you say are the MOST important to you personally?

The list included 15 different values, such as the following:

• Security: certainty, predictability
• ­Compensation: money and/or benefits
• ­Achievement: mastery of a task
• Variety: diversity of activities, people, and tasks
• ­Affiliation: connect with people

I followed up with questions about how the company we were researching might help them realize those important values.  After answering the question about which values were important, participants seemed to be in a more thoughtful state of mind and went much deeper with ways the brand helps them achieve the values than they had in prior research.

Find out what’s important to your customers.  Call me at 760-469-9266 or email info at bureauwest.com.