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DO YA?

You think you know your customer.

Do ya? Let's find out.

do ya?what's actually truesays who?know your customerdo ya?what's actually truesays who?know your customer

SO, WHAT DO YOU ACTUALLY KNOW AS FACT?

But how much do you actually know about why?

You have customers. People are buying. Something is clearly working.

Yes, but.... how much do you actually know about why?

Not what you think. Not what everyone agreed in the last planning meeting. Not the customer persona that says something like “Sophie, age 37, lives a busy life and thinks about your product more than her actual kids” (fictitious fluff).

Actually know.

How customer understanding gets built

Conversations. Sales data. Feedback. Complaints. Gut instinct.

The loudest customer. Something somebody said three years ago. A random LinkedIn message from someone trying to sell you something.

If we're being truthful, quite a lot of winging it.

Over time, assumptions have a habit of turning into facts.

And “we think” gets verrrrryy expensive.

From what you think you know → to knowing what's actually true.

You can grow without really understanding your customer

To a point.

A great product, good instincts and a bit of momentum can get you surprisingly far.

People are buying. Revenue is growing. Something is clearly working.

Until growth starts to get harder.

The things that got you here aren't working quite as well as they used to. So you start looking for the next lever to pull.

A different message?
Another product?
More marketing?
A new channel?
A tweak on your proposition?

There are plenty of places you could turn. The problem is, you're not really sure where you should.

If you don't properly understand why people choose you, what they value, what they don't, what they need and how they see you, it's very hard to know where the real opportunity lies.

So the questions start piling up.

  • What should we double down on?
  • Who should we be targeting?
  • Why aren't more people buying?
  • Actually, why are people buying?
  • What do they really care about?
  • What should we build next?
  • Where does the next stage of growth come from?

You can keep making educated guesses.

Or you can find out.

You can grow without deeply understanding your customer. But you'll struggle to unlock the full potential of the business without it.

SO, WHAT DO YOU ACTUALLY KNOW AS FACT?

  • “Who they are they at a soul level.”
  • “They buy us because of.....”
  • “The biggest barrier is x.”
  • “They really care about x, y and z.”
  • “They'd never pay for....”
  • “The problem we're solving for them is x.”
  • “We know they want this.”

Says who?

Some of those things will be absolutely true.

Some might have been true once.

Some will be half true.

Some have been repeated in so many meetings that nobody remembers where they came from.

And some might be complete bollocks.

Let's find out which is which.

First, we get everything out of your heads

We talk to the people across the business who know, see and hear different things about the customer.

Founders and leaders. Sales. Marketing. Product. Customer service.

And this is where it usually gets interesting. Because very often everyone thinks they know the customer. They just don't all know the same customer.

We get it all out.

What do you believe about your customer? Why do you believe it? What evidence sits underneath it? What's a fact? What's a hunch? What's something everyone has just sort of... accepted?

We pull apart what you know, what you think, what you're assuming and what you simply don't know yet.

Now we know what we actually need to find out.

Then we go to the people who actually know

Your customers.

Not another customer satisfaction survey.

Not “on a scale of 1–10, how likely are you to recommend us?”

Most definitely not twenty minutes of polite chit-chat about whether they like your packaging.

Proper conversations. The kind that get beyond the answer people think they're supposed to give.

We get underneath what's actually going on in their world.

  • What they think.
  • How they feel.
  • What matters to them.
  • What they believe.
  • What they care about and what they couldn't care less about.
  • How they see the world you're operating in. How they see you within it.
  • The language they use. What's shaping the way they think and behave.

What are they telling us that nobody thought to ask?

Because that's often where the really useful stuff is.

What you thought → what we found → what it changes

WHAT YOU THOUGHTWHAT WE FOUNDWHAT IT CHANGES

Some assumptions will survive.

Some won't.

Some will turn out to be right, but for completely different reasons.

And we'll probably uncover things that weren't even on the list to begin with. Good. That's why we're doing it.

Knowing your customer isn't the end goal

We're doing it so you can make better decisions.

  • Who you target.
  • What you sell.
  • Where you sell it.
  • How you position it.
  • What you say.
  • What you build next.
  • What you double down on.
  • What you stop doing.

Customer understanding is only useful if it changes something.

Turns out, we didn't know what we thought we knew.

01

FOOD INNOVATION

The business thought the innovation was the story.

It was clever, totally innovative in the category. The only problem was, customers just didn't particularly care. Swap that, they did not give a single sh*t about the technology. What they cared about was what the product enabled them to do and the real reason they were buying was about as far removed from the technology as you could get.

What changed

We stopped asking customers to care about the clever bit and built the proposition around what they actually valued.

02

MALE GROOMING

The business wanted men to adopt a new product.

Turns out understanding of the product wasn't really the problem, the biggest challenge was behavioural and societal. Men had spent years caring for their hair in pretty much the same way, and the brand was asking them to change.

What changed

The question shifted from “How do we sell them a different product?” to “What would make changing this behaviour feel worthwhile?”

03

HEALTH

The service existed in a world centred around diagnosis.

So it would have been very easy to assume diagnosis was what people wanted. It wasn't that simple. People were trying to understand why life felt difficult and find something that might actually help.

What changed

The opportunity became much bigger than diagnosis alone.

You leave knowing more than you did when we started

  • What matters to your customers.
  • What doesn't.
  • How they see you.
  • Why they choose you.
  • What gets in their way.
  • The language they actually use.
  • What you were right about.
  • What you weren't.
  • What you hadn't even thought to ask.

And most importantly:

What all of that changes about what you do next.

Because otherwise we've just done some interesting research. And what's the point in that?

The exact approach depends on the question we're trying to answer.

WHO'S DOING THE THINKING?

Carly Osman Holme, founder of Sprowt, holding up cards reading Fake News and Truth during a workshop

Led by Carly Osman Holme.

I've spent twenty years being professionally nosy about why people do what they do and turning what I find into better business decisions.

I've worked with businesses of every shape and size, from global organisations and household names to scale-ups and healthcare businesses.

  • Coca-Cola
  • Nestlé
  • JUX
  • Cheeky Panda
  • Cawston Press
  • Oddbox
  • BBC

20 years. Different categories. Big questions. Real experience.

How much do you actually know about your customer?

If an important decision starts with the words “we think…”, it might be worth finding out.

From what you think you know → to knowing what's actually true.

Bring us the question.

We need to talk →

Tell us what you think you know. What you suspect but can't prove. The assumption that keeps niggling. We'll start there.

Prefer email? carly@sprowt.uk

do ya?do ya?