In marketing, understanding your company’s target customer demographic is crucial to success. Yes, it’s important to know your demographic data: age, sex, education level, income, family status, and location. But what is the best way to understand your customers’ psychology?
How about being one of them?
This is arguably the biggest advantage you could ever have.
I spent the last 7 years as the cofounder of Fontana Candle Co. with my husband. We started the company in our home as a hobby and turned it into an Inc. 5000 business. In my role as chief marketing officer, I use my time to craft the strategy for our product development, content creation, collaborations, email marketing, and influencer outreach. Our marketing department is one of our superpowers, catapulting us into extreme growth.
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The secret sauce
What secret sauce has propelled our brand to grow rapidly when others in the same industry stay stagnant?
We know our niche intimately. We understand what our customers want, because we are very much part of our customer demographic, wanting the exact things they do.
Being part of your customer demographic gives you two distinct advantages:
- A true understanding of your customer
- An authentic connection with your customer
These two advantages, in turn, create customer trust, true brand loyalty, and strong brand advocates.
Authentic marketing
As a candle company in the wellness niche, our priority is safe and transparent ingredients, leading to healthier indoor air quality. The vast majority of our customers are educated millennial women seeking the best choices for their family. They read ingredient labels, scan barcode labels in the grocery store, swap out synthetically-fragranced personal care products, and use air purifiers throughout their homes.
We bring our customers into our home and office through our social media; they see us making choices aligned with their ethos. The products in our home are the products in their homes. We show changing out the filters in our air purifiers, the best new organic coffee we found, and our rebounder and sauna for detox. My husband wears his Oura ring, and we record content while doing our walks with weighted vests.
We come off as authentic, because what we do is authentic. We understand what words to use when talking to our customers, and it doesn’t sound forced or fake. It is a true connection because it isn’t forced or fake. Our daily lives mirror our customers’ daily lives.
Is it scalable?
I continually ask myself if this authentic, personable framework is scalable as we handle fewer of the daily tasks ourselves. We are in the health and wellness niche, but it is impossible for every team member to be passionate about wellness, because at our core, we are a manufacturer.
We need to have employees skilled in important business functions: project development, manufacturing, fulfillment, email marketing, customer service, etc. Finding employees who are skilled at these functions, as well as passionate about nontoxic living, is like finding a needle in a haystack.
Culture training and embodying our company values in everything we do is paramount as we continue to grow our team. We hope to foster a curiosity about wellness by offering wellness credits, access to sound bath meditations, and sauna sessions. Healthy food options are available at every function.
Our wellness culture is never forced on any employee. It is available for those who want it, but not everyone on the team will. That is okay.
However, the team members who set company strategy, develop products, and directly interact with our customers are the ones who have to embody our mission and understand of our customer demographic. This core group is where I focus my effort to ensure there is a true embodiment of our customers’ values.
I have watched as other wellness brands massively scaled, and seemed to lose who they were. Recently, a probiotic soda brand launched collaborations with large brands with no ingredient ethos. The collaborations were fun and had the “virality factor.” However, when you delve deeper into the social media posts, you see comments from customers who wonder if the brand still cares about their “better for you” mission. The trust has been broken from one mismatched collaboration.
As a CMO, this is one of my biggest nightmares.
Maintain the mission
What can I do to ensure that our authentic customer connections and mission remain as we continue growing beyond what I can manage on my own?
In the last year, we created a Brand Marketing Manifesto that distills all our current team members’ innate knowledge about our brand and how it should interact with the world. We wanted a document to hand to all new customer-impacting employees on their first day, that was essentially like they are sitting next to me and can pick my brain, like our current employees have learned about our company.
This document includes our mission, brand voice parameters, our brand story, and claims we are comfortable making. It has in-depth demographic information and customer personas to help our employees learn more about their lives and pain points, and where we fit into the picture.
And finally, this document contains our partnership guidelines, so we have no collaboration mis-matches that would cause our customers to lose trust in our ingredient standards.
When you are a small company, it is a superpower to be part of your customer demographic. It allows you to innately foster a connection that creates an unbreakable trust. Not everyone in your organization will be passionate about your niche, which is fine, as long as they understand your business’s mission and respect it. As you scale, it is important to find ways to share the knowledge of your niche to all of your customer-impacting employees and agencies. For us, our Brand Marketing Manifesto has been our answer to this scaling question.
