Profiling
Profiling is the base of any (marketing) strategy and is focussed on world class WHO diagnostics in order to understand your target group better than your competition.
Profiling is the art of seeing beyond the actual usage & buying behaviour and rational cognitive processes. Few people can actually express the true reasons behind their actions.
Through our experience we have come to the conclusion, time and again, that the key to understanding human (consumer) behaviour is to approach it as a dynamic system and investigate it as if it were a crime scene. We therefore take into account not only the act (what happened) and the context (where did it happen), but also the motive (why did it happen) & the consequence (what are the results, derived satisfactions and promoter scores), the opportunity (when did it happen) and of course the UNSUB (who is this consumer).
To diagnose these elements we go beyond traditional research and expand our thinking to include techniques, insights and sense coming from a myriad of different angles such as: anthropology, psychiatry, ethnography, sociology, crime scene investigation and forensic science, to name but a few.
Our keys to profiling are:
- Purpose: Composing and managing profiles should serve a clear purpose. Many organizations track and collect data which is seldom (not to say never) used to its full potential. We endeavour to extract, re-apply and rephrase existing information and knowledge (on paper or in the heads of people) to truly understand your markets.
- Intuition: Moving beyond the actual facts, we look for the relevance in the larger frame of the "Human System" and bring in new perspective. This allows us to formulate, test and - when needed - validate new, differentiating perspectives on the business.
- Understanding: No profiling exercise is complete if it doesn't allow you to better "sense" your consumer. Our practice goes beyond the gathering of facts. We map the market from the consumer's point of view and provide new levels of understanding.
