Kelford Labs Daily: A reason to be nosy
Understanding your ideal clients.
“You need to have an open mind, the nosiness of a detective, and to assimilate all the information you can get from every imaginable source when you start to create advertising. It is knowledge that stimulates great advertising ideas and your own intuition.”
— Mary Well Lawrence, A Big Life (in advertising)
When I talk to clients about customer research, I use that line a lot—“the nosiness of a detective.”
That’s the spirit we want to take when we’re talking to past, ideal clients about their experience of our value.
We want to find out where they were, and what they were doing, when they realized they had a problem we might be able to help them with.
We want to know what surprised them—both good and bad—about working with us, as compared to the alternatives they might have tried before.
We want to know what attracted them at first, and what impressed them most.
And we want to know what they say to others when they refer to us, and how they overcome any objections they might run into.
In essence, we want to know how they describe our value in their own words, from their own experiences, and based on their own perspective.
Because it’s that perspective—that lens—that other ideal clients will share.
And the way to discover it is to be nosy.
