Lessons from the Vine #3 for Consumer Product Marketers and Developers – Boutique is Personal – Darla Hall
During a recent trip through Sonoma Wine Country in California, I was struck by the gracious hospitality of so many small family vineyards with tasting rooms and wonderful boutique products. One of our favorite family-owned and operated wineries was Mueller Winery. Bob Mueller is a biologist-turned-wine maker who received his master’s degree in Food Science at UC Davis. My business partner and I felt an instant bond and kinship as fellow Food Scientists. Entrepreneurial winery owners, like Bob, welcome visitors daily into their homes, their lives and their livelihoods. They enjoy the opportunity to showcase and talk about a product they’ve put their heart and soul into. They develop a personal and direct relationship with their customers who trust and value what they offer, keeping customers coming back year after year. Some of the family vineyards we visited only sell their wines through wine clubs and tasting room sales. So, building relationships and keeping customers engaged is the key to sustaining the business.
Like these vineyards, Research Vibe depends on clients who trust and value what we have to offer, so I started thinking. How do we provide gracious hospitality and build strong relationships with potential customers and users of our services (e.g. developers, brand managers, executives, operations, technical services, sales)? How do we keep clients engaged so they come back again and again because they believe in the solutions we provide? How do we achieve a sense that we offer personal and customized approaches and strategies to each customer?
My experience has taught me that the primary difference between a one-time customer and a lifetime advocate is a personal connection.
In fact, one of our core values at Research Vibe is to build and nurture relationships with our customers. We believe that it is only through rich relationships with our customers that we are able to design research strategies that harvest rich insights and revelations about the consumer and product experience that can be translated into market success. Following, are some of the practical ways we live out this core value in our day-to-day work.
- We start to build a lasting and on-going relationship with a customer by first understanding how that individual or project team works best, offering services and systems that fit seamlessly into both personal work practices and the wider organizational processes, and making it easy to do business together. It may sound Dale Carnegie-like, but practicing the old marketing philosophy of understanding a customer’s greatest need and figuring out how to fill that need deepens a relationship by building trust and demonstrating the ability to solve even the most challenging problems. We also genuinely care about people and work hard to develop heart-to-heart human connections with our customers. Initially, I like to establish common ground with new research team members either through mutual interests, common professional or academic backgrounds or experiences, or lifestyle similarities. Often my personal sharing with clients can lead to discovering a great restaurant to try on my next business trip, exciting ideas for an upcoming vacation, exchanging joys and challenges of raising a family, or solving any number of life’s little problems. Additionally, we feel it is equally as important to have fun and enjoy our work together as it is to deliver quality results and learning. On more than one occasion, a little laughter or a fond memory has been the trigger for a customer to pick up the phone when the next research initiative comes along.
- We keep customers engaged and maintain momentum in the relationship by creating opportunities to share and educate them about the value we can provide. We focus on getting our heads out of the data and involving individuals and project teams in the research process, working collaboratively to develop strategies, mine insights, and apply the learning to meet business needs. Our customers know their product and brand best; we know the data and consumer best. It is a beautiful and productive partnership. We are constantly on the lookout to acquire and share relevant consumer, product, market, and technical information that apply to a customer’s brand or product category. This unsolicited sharing allows us to engage in on-going dialogue with our customers about new research priorities and initiatives while providing them with valuable and trusted resources.
- Offering a customized research approach does not mean every project is a brand new experience. Rather, we feel our knowledge, skills, and experience allow us to better listen, clarify, and understand the objectives and needs of each customer and offer a strategy that addresses the specific research question or challenge. We will often take a time-out in the planning process to ask questions or gather critical information that ultimately reveals a more effective strategy or approach. We find that spending time up front in planning creates efficiencies in the research process and makes the end result more robust. We look for opportunities to recommend and experiment with novel research approaches or ways of presenting and delivering insights. Sometimes those customized approaches are so effective that they end up becoming standard practices for us. We are always mindful to keep our research grounded in sound scientific principles while allowing our approach to evolve and re-align with ever-shifting business and market demands.
What’s your secret to building and nourishing your customer relationships? We welcome a conversation about how to ensure every connection with a customer blossoms into a satisfying and thriving relationship for years to come.
Darla Hall, Co-Founder
Research Vibe
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