Hair growth is a beautiful phenomenon. You would assume that men who are reaching their peak and midlife crisis will need a hair growth product. But the fun fact to be considered here is that men aged 22 to 35 were the maximum users. The young adults go to colleges, are active on the dating scene and want aroma in every interaction they have. It’s part of the pop culture.
Who knew a young lad of 23 years of age is the biggest consumer of our hair growth roll-ons?! And what happens when indirect customers buy products that are meant for a different audience? Should the product team focus on the Mayor’s son or the Mayor’s moustache? Dilemma. Research. Campaigns. That’s how the cookie crumbles.
As Soulflower started spreading its aroma catered to Audience A (let’s call him ‘The Mayor’) through Audience B (The Mayor’s son), we realized that we needed to screen through data in a smarter and more ingenious ways rather than good old slice and dice with a pinch of speculation.
For all intensive purposes, allow me to show you the enormity of this data monster. We retail online on many platforms and in top retailers as well as through our own website and market outreach. In totality, more than a 1000 customers buy our products on a daily basis. We are innovative with our products, case in point, the moustache grower, the PMS roll-on, the sleep well roll-on, the charcoal soap and the ginger bath salts. These are just a few examples of what we produced after studying data from customer buying and desire patterns. We call it “Love Patterns” i.e. We will make what the customer loves so that they continue their relationship with love through www.Soulflower.biz
To elaborate further, let’s look at where we spread this kind of love. In questioning our product development, we pondered on the following:
What happens when the country you sell your products in, has a total of 1200 towns with active buyers and a new found spending power? What happens when 1000 of those towns have your greatest active customers? You party! And once the hangover is fading off, it sinks in to you that there is a huge data chunk that your company will need to process to keep that party going!
When we received buying patterns, browsing patterns, and other big data of our users we tried to slice and dice the data in a million different ways. Yes, those correlations were interesting however it got us nowhere. Regional habits didn’t match. Age factors didn’t match. Females didn’t behave in similar fashion. Men were buying products in a disjointed pattern. A chaos ensued within our office because nobody could figure out what product makes the Mayor’s Moustache Grow?
In the retail business, customers are the key. You are just as good as your product success and your last creative idea. Sustaining a business in the day and age of the online marketplace is a demanding and draining job as your customers show patterns that have never been witnessed before. It started to sink into us that we need to understand what are the love points of our end users? What do they love, desire and feel good about? How will they respond to our forms of products that spread this happiness? What time of the day do these 40 million shoppers enjoy purchasing your product? What product are they really looking for? Does a hair growth product do well because men are using it for their moustaches? What is the subconscious mind of your customer really demanding from you? Why are women buying jasmine oil and using it for their Pooja Ghar (place of worship) instead of their scalps?
It is all about the unsaid need of your customer!
Soon, I will write about what the unsaid need of the customer was and how we analysed big data finally!