Know your customer: Why your customer base is your key to business success

What are your customers like? I regularly ask this question of business owners, both with my journalist’s hat and marketing man’s hat on. It constantly amazes me how little people seem to know about their clients. One by one, yes, they can tell me and in some detail, but they don’t seem to have collated that information into a coherent picture of their customer base as a whole.

As a simple example, one retailer told me ‘we see everybody from a high court judge to a street sweeper’. It’s a nice anecdote, but when I asked who were her core customers she was clearly floundering: basically, she didn’t know and she was pretty switched on.