Using Customer Salience to Improve Business Success

How well do you know your customers?

Now, before you answer, know that the answer to this question can mean the difference between success and failure. That may seem absolute, but, if you think about it on all levels of your organization, not knowing what the customer wants from you can mean that:

• A process or policy is created that works to hinder any remotely positive customer experience
• A strategy is implemented that doesn’t appeal or even reach a business’ target audience
• A product or service is created that is completely useless to the brand’s current customer base
• A lot of money, effort and resources are continually wasted across the board

What’s more, there is key research from many respected organizations who have studied the propensity and impact of non-data-driven decision-making across a range of different industries, which can ultimately lead to situations like the examples above.

A Deloitte study, for example, found that most executives do not believe their companies are insight-driven, with only 37% of those placing their company in the top two categories on the Deloitte ‘maturity scale’.

A Forrester report takes this further, claiming that just under a half of all business decisions are informed by information and/or analysis.

A study conducted by McKinsey & Company records that decision-making takes up a huge proportion of management’s time, as much as 70% for some c-suite executives, which equals around $250 million worth in their salaries.

With these three studies highlighting the deficit of insight-based decision-making worldwide, it makes sense that a recent Marketing Week study recorded that net spend on market research has been negative for nearly a decade now. Which echoes the ongoing falls seen in the IPA Bellwether report.

So, now that we better understand the reality of the situation, let’s refocus on the question at hand - how well do you or your stakeholders know your customers?

If the answer is just ‘okay’ or even ‘not well’, then you might find this article helpful.

Introducing Customer Salience

There is a new strategy being created as we speak by a few industry experts aimed at directly targeting this widespread lack of customer understanding - the term ‘Customer Salience’ was just debuted by Danny Russell in a recent AURA masterclass, and has been positioned as the answer to despairing insight experts’ prayers for better stakeholder engagement.

Taking a note from the marketing handbook surrounding ‘brand salience’, Customer Salience is the other side of the coin. It is defined by Insights Empowerment Company, FlexMR, as “the propensity for stakeholders teams and departments to think about customers when making business decisions”, and this new term and corresponding strategy can help insight experts and advocates in all industries to educate stakeholders on their customers, and enable stakeholders to actively think about customers in all decisions they make daily.

Customer Salience, while a new premise, is a promising strategy that is the culmination of decades of mindset and methodologies dedicated to engaging stakeholders in market research and turning insight-based decisions into impactful action - the market research mother-load, so to speak.

So, what does Customer Salience mean for stakeholders?

The become truly Customer Salient, stakeholders need to embed customer insights into all decisions at all levels of the organization. Instead of insight experts needing a seat at the top table, which is a front we have been fighting for for years now, they need a seat at many or even all of the tables.

Every table a decision is made, in all teams at all levels of the organization, there needs to be the presence of customer insights. This doesn’t mean the customer dictates everything that the business does no questions asked, but more that customer insights are able to influence the final decision alongside business objectives, current fiscal figures and available resources in equal measure.

For stakeholders, this means investing into market research and their insight teams so that they can harvest high-quality, impactful customer data and insights, which is then used and actively slotted into all decision-making processes. Once this happens, you will then see a huge positive difference in the brand perception, customer retention and new business, and business growth to say the least.

Building a Customer Salient Culture

Saying all of the above is all well and good, but actually employing the principles of customer salience to help stakeholders make the right decisions every time is a tough task for any insight expert, advocate, or team.

While the principles we are employing have been the driving force behind insight activation for years, we’re just now approaching it from a different angle and figuring out the best ways to implement them in more successful ways, insight professionals are still facing the same challenges they always have when it comes to stakeholder engagement.

So, how can we persuade the majority of stakeholders in a business to become customer salient? What is in it for them, other than the great business case outlined above?

The trick, is to tackle this on two fronts - the personal and the bigger picture. On the personal side of things, appealing to each stakeholder in each team across the entire business individually is a humongous task that will take up more time than is worth for any insight expert, but making it personal to each team will be more than worth it.

Understanding their team processes, their decisions, their remit, and using that to build your persuasive argument will have a lot more impact than addressing the business as a whole on it’s own.

This will then feed into the bigger picture, where insight experts and advocates need to build a customer salient culture within the stakeholder business. This culture will become the foundation on which good insightful decisions are made.

Using resources from toolkits, thought leadership articles such as these on GreenBook, advice from peer networking events and more, we stand a chance at creating these cultures from the ground up and swaying stakeholders to the side of insights.

Using persuasive communication tactics, making current and historical data freely available to view for all stakeholders on interactive platforms, conducting data audits to identify the most prolific insight-deprived areas of the organization, and other such measures will help insight experts really take ownership of this challenge and start to gain ground on the war for stakeholder engagement.