12A – Figuring Out Buyer Behavior No. 1

This exercise involves interviewing three customers to determine how they begin their buyer behavior process. Specifically, I'd like you to focus on the first two steps: need awareness and information search. This information is critically important to helping us maximize our marketing efforts.

Here's what you should do.

1) Pick a segment. In class, we have discussed how you might intuit the existence of segments that might exist in your venture's market. For this exercise, you must pick one segment.  

2) Find three people who would fit that segment and arrange to interview them. These interviews, if conducted properly, should take about 10-15 minutes. Any less, and you won't be able to obtain adequate information. 

3) Begin with need awareness. In earlier exercises, you have identified an unmet need and developed a solution. If the person you are talking to does not have the same unmet, then you need to move on. You may not include this as one of your three interviews. If the person you are talking to does have the problem, then you're on the right track! For need awareness, we need to figure out at what times, situations, places, contexts, etc., their need becomes the most salient. The questions you ask should be related to determining exactly when, how, and where their need awareness occurs. 

4) Move to information search. When the person you are interviewing becomes aware of their need, what is the very first thing they do to find a solution to their problem? What sources of information do they look for? When they search in Google, what are their search terms? Do they talk to friends and family.

5) Report the findings of your research. Simply summarize what you learned in the interviews.

6) Draw conclusions. Based on what you know about this segment and what you learned in your interviews, how would you succinctly describe this segment in terms of need awareness and information search?