Over the past decade, we’ve run thousands of Customer Scenario® mapping sessions with both business and consumer customers—asking these customers how they would ideally like to do business with their suppliers, how they’d like to have problems addressed, and how they plan for and address many of their personal and business goals.
Customers’ preferred scenarios are very different for different types of customers (by demographics, psychographics, and roles) in different contexts (emergency, routine, impulsive, planned, etc.). Of course, consumers’ scenarios differ from business peoples’ scenarios.
Recurring Scenario Patterns. Although Customer Scenarios are very role-specific and quite context-sensitive, we’ve discovered a number of recurring themes or patterns that show up over and over again—patterns that cross product categories and industries—from manufacturing to financial services, from commercial real estate to consumer electronics, from capital equipment to groceries, from travel to insurance. In fact, many of the most fundamental of these patterns are identical for both consumer and business customers: for example, business customers buying capital equipment or software share many of the same ideal buying preferences with consumers’ purchasing complex products such as consumer electronics, cars, and kitchen appliances; similarly business customers with broken equipment want the same easy repair process as consumers whose products aren’t working correctly.
Comments