On Thursday February 19th the ECE Collegereeks was all about the customer. The main theme was how to learn more about your customer and -maybe even more importantly- how to learn more from your customer.

Prof. Ed Nijssen, who has a history at the economics department of Erasmus University, is now active as a marketing professor at the TU Eindhoven. His focus is on learning from the market while developing new products and services, which is exactly what he talked about in Thursday’s lecture. He emphasized that it is essential for an entrepreneur to be aware of all the information that you can easily gather from your customer and to start working with this in a systematic way. Market research is not something that can only be done by the big corporates. Moreover, SMEs should also be much more customer-focused, because it is only when you really start listening to you customer that you will start to discover the real value you can offer to the market. 

The second speaker was CEO and co-founder of Compare Group: Ben Kerkhof. Founded initially with the Finnish Vertaa.fi and the Dutch vergelijk.nl, the websites quickly grew into a massive brand; currently active in five countries with nearly 2 million products. Despite the business running for already more than 13 years, Ben Kerkhof confessed that he only really started getting to know his real customer during the last two years. The name of this customer ‘persona’? Lisa. Lisa is a house wife in her mid 40’s with two kids, a small dog and a nicely furnished house- but always facing a lack of time. Because of this lack of time, Lisa wants to be supported and needs advice when it comes to deciding which new products to buy. As Ben has discovered, Vergelijk.nl is the ideal place for Lisa to shop. Over the past two years Vergelijk.nl has gathered a group of 500 ‘Lisa’s’ who give feedback and validate new mock-up designs of the website. With this detailed knowledge about their ideal customer, Vergelijk.nl has improved various parts of their whole customer journey and their Net Promotor Scores have been rising through the roof. 

Based on this experience with finding ‘Lisa’, Ben’s advice for all entrepreneurs is to have a clear focus on who your perfect customer type is, and to align your product exceptionally well with this focus in mind. So ignore ‘Frank’, ‘Bob’ and ‘Clarissa’ and start looking for your ‘Lisa’! 

Curious and want to know more about validating you new product or service? Take a look at our New Business Cycle programme and contact us.