Knowing vs. Understanding Your Customer

Do you know the difference between "knowing who your customer is and understanding your customer?" Lee Huang, director of digital strategy and product development at NBC Universal, explores the difference in an article at Clickz.

There's a difference between knowing who your customer is and understanding your customer. You need to do both. Most people spend most of their time on the former and too little time on the latter. This will ultimately result in failure. Why? If you don't understand your customer, you won't have full clarity on your value proposition."

Do you understand your customers? Ask yourself: Why are customers interested in the articles they read?

• What problems they are trying to solve?
• What questions are they trying to answer?
• What information is hard for your audience to find?
• What are your readers' objectives and what workflow processes do they try to go through to achieve those objectives?
• Why are customers going to your competitors' Web sites in addition to yours? Why are some abandoning yours altogether?
• Why do your customers give word-of-mouth referrals to competitive Web sites but not yours?
• How are your customers' behaviors and preferences changing and evolving?

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