“You are the most important thing”. You've heard and read this phrase hundreds of times in conventional advertising, right? However, the reality is that the customer doesn't seem to be the most important thing today. If that were the case, we would have more enriching experiences with a high degree of personalization. As well as Spotify, Disney or Amazon have managed to personalize the experience with great success thanks to the Aarchetypes, in many other companies this seems to be a pending issue.
What is a Customer Archetype?
Archetypes are model characters that represent groups of clients based on their motivations, needs, behaviors and lifestyles.
When we focus on the consumer in their role as a buyer, we talk about Buyer Persona. When we refer to the consumer as a user of our products and services, that is, when we focus on the customer experience, we talk about Archetypes. This nomenclature is used to designate a specific methodology for segmenting customers based on emotions, attitudes and behaviors.
It is still an enlarged segment, since it includes this sociodemographic information, but it focuses on the aspect of social psychology and human behavior. And it's that qualitative information that explains the differences between people and their different expectations for brands and shopping experiences.
What are Archetypes for?
There are many uses we can make of Archetypes, the most common of which are:
1. Designing experiences and value propositions. It's no longer enough just to do things right, you have to do them incredible. The customer must be surprised so that they have a good memory of their transaction with our brand. In this way, he will recommend us more easily and he will be very likely to repeat the operation.
2. Design of marketing and communication plans. Perhaps this is the most relevant point. Communicating more effectively to empathize with the customer is synonymous with success, and being able to develop concrete strategies to maximize impact is essential.
3. Definition of new business relationship models. Not all people who visit your website or store are potential customers. You must understand their motivations to provide a unique service to each individual. There is no need to focus on selling products, but rather on building loyal customers.
4. Align our KPIs with our clients' KPIs. When placing the customer as the protagonist of our business, it is essential that there be a convergence of objectives between both parties in order to improve results and satisfaction.
5. Identifying new markets. By delimiting the values and motivations that drive our clients, we may identify new business opportunities in markets that a priori were not on our radar in the short term.
How are Archetypes constructed?
1. Analyze the information. Review what you already know (or think you know) about your customers and what you would like to know. To do this, it's important to sit down with all areas of the company, not just those that interact with customers. It's important to identify blind spots as well as inconsistencies between what the customer says and what they do.
2. Decide on the methodology. The optimal methodology for this tool are personal or telephone interviews, lasting between 10 and 30 minutes. Keep in mind that between 6 and 10 interviews are enough to feed an Archetype, since from that number the information is repeated quite a lot. These can be exploratory interviews (without starting hypotheses) or in-depth interviews.
3. Manage interviews. The most important thing is to think of the interview as a conversation, not as a question and answer session. We must structure it from the perspective of the customer, of their buying process or touchpoints with the company, not from the questions we want to get answers to.
4. Analyze the information. When analyzing information, it is recommended to use spreadsheets or software programs that allow us to label the different insights obtained, in order to later detect patterns and clusters of customers with similar behaviors, expectations and pain points.
5. Identify patterns. In this step, we must identify the Archetypes and the characteristics that differentiate them. There is no ideal number of Archetypes per company or business unit, everything will depend on the budgets at our disposal. With the information obtained, we can begin to build our customer archetypes.
At Izo we have more than 20 years surprising and Thrilling to our customers.
Do you need us to help you with your Customer Experience challenges? Write to us through this form and we'll be happy to hear from you 🙂
%209.46.03%E2%80%AFa.m..webp)
