There are many reasons why a company may want to focus on changing consumer attitude, plummeting sales, new competitors’ strategy, or even a new competition. By studying and analyzing consumer behavior, we can derive insights on what changes will be relevant to our consumers and help us overcome our problem in the first place.
Simple Steps for Changing Consumer Perception
- Determine the attributes that matter to your consumers while they are buying your or your competitors’ product. If you are a café, your typical attributes are service quality, food quality, ambiance, menu price, etc.
- Through surveys or interviews, determine how your fare in these attributes and also include your competitors. This will not only give information about your company, but it will also provide a comparison with your competition.
- You can use this data for analysis and interpretation. If you see a problem experienced by many customers, then understand that pattern and probable cause. Let’s revisit our café example; many customers perceive that the food is highly expensive, then understand it could be due to the people not finding the ambiance good enough for the price or the perceived food quality as low grade.
- After deriving insights, it is time to take action. For our café case, it can be reducing food price, asserting through marketing or promotional material that the food quality is very at par with the industry, or upgrading the décor of the place to match with customer expectations. It can also trickle down to other areas like the service, asking them to be more courteous or well-groomed to increase the overall outcome.
- At last, measure the change in perception. It is not necessary to perform one more analysis. Still, we can pay attention to an increase in revenue, feedback, and complaints, among other things, to see whether our action plan succeeded or not.
- After evaluation, if you still think it is not working, and there is something not right with the action plan, perhaps implement a new one.
It may look like quite a task, but it is one of the best ways to change customer perception about your brand and to gain a competitive advantage.