93 Know Your Customer

Great brand identities forge a real and direct emotional connection with their customers. It starts with a deep understanding of your target audience. Needs, preferences, goals, desires: You can never know enough about your customer.

There are a wide variety of traditional customer research techniques—surveys, focus groups, etc.—but newer ethnographic research methods are becoming an increasingly larger part of the design research mix.

Ethnographic research methods are aimed at discovering unmet or unarticulated customer needs that are less likely to be revealed with more overt research methods. They include activities such as customer observation and shadowing. Meeting the needs of customers in ways that others either currently don’t or can’t is a true competitive advantage.

Word World
Siegel+Gale
Douglas Sellers, Joo Chae

You are not your customer. The Siegel+Gale team realized that when they developed the identity program for Word World, which is targeted at a specific demographic—kids—and designed accordingly.