Know Your Customer

KYC (Know Your Customer) is a powerful concept but most of the time is dealt with superficially. From my many years of working as a banker, this concept was applied to identifying and focusing on what makes customers different instead of what makes them human. I think the focus on a customer deviates us from looking at them as human beings. I have this principle in life, “Treat people as human beings first before they are anything else.” The truth is we are all the same at the core. We are the same when all the civilization, culture, tribe, language, education, and lifestyle are stripped away. Our desires, our needs, and our motivations are practically the same.

To understand our customers, we must focus on what makes us human beings because, despite our differences, we are the same. To understand our customers from a branding perspective we must ask ourselves the following important questions:

1. What makes them human?
2. How do they make sense of the world around them in a world characterized by information overload?
3. How do they process, store and retrieve the information that they come across?
4. How do they make decisions and choices in their lives?
5. What motivates or drives their behavior?
6. How do they relate to others and the environment?

The answers to the above questions help us to design better brands brand experiences that align with our customer’s needs and result in strong brand connections that deliver long-term brand success. With competition among brands at an all-time high, the customer is always struggling to answer the question, “Why Should I Choose Your Brand? Our deep understanding of our customers will help customers to choose our brands all the time.

I prefer to look at the above questions through the lenses of psychology, neuroscience, evolution, and sociology. An the conclusion that i must draw is that we are all the same.

We are all the Same

1. As human beings, we are hard-wired for survival. Our most basic instinct is to survive and we will do anything to survive. As a result, our mechanisms and organs have evolved and are adapted to ensure that can survive in our environment. Therefore, we attach importance to things that help us to survive.
2. We all make decisions on two basic foundations: avoidance of pain or seeking pleasure. Even though the motivation to avoid pain or danger is always stronger than the motivation to seek pleasure based on the need to survive.
3. Our brains are remarkably alike. They respond similarly to key stimuli and react along the same paths to messages. This means we can generalize our assumptions based on studies of others.
4. The most primal, emotional sections of our brains react at a pure, pre-cognitive level, in milliseconds. We respond faster to emotional stimuli than logic. In fact, it is much harder to convince anyone with facts. Emotional appeals cut through logic at speeds that that hundred times faster than logic.

The idea is by understanding: how we pay attention; how we process information; how we store and retrieve information for use; how we make decisions; what drives our actions and behavior; what influences our tastes and preferences; and how the people around us influence us; then as brand leaders we will be in a better position to build brands that can’t be ignored in a sea of noise in the market place, create brand experiences that guarantee the brand is given the kings seat in the client’s long term memory and be the first brand retrieved as and when customer needs and sensibilities arise.