Research: Customer Contact.

After having a chat with this fish supplier I decided to talk to some of the customers at the fish & chip shop. Customers are after all at the heart of every business so I felt this was important.

I decided to keep the questions short and sweet and ask them while they were waiting for their order. I wanted to find out what their favourite fish was to see if it matched Hugh’s opinion that Brits only like haddock or cod. I also wanted to know what they thought of fish & chips and the fish & chip shop experience, any word that came to mind. I brought with me a black card cut out of a haddock for them to write their answers on and cooked some battered plaice for them to sample. I thought some free food would be a nice thank you for them completing the questions and it would also let me judge some of their responses to a new type of fish.

I found that the majority of the customers I asked preferred haddock, next in line were cod and salmon, only a couple chose different types of fish such as halibut or mackerel. Getting people to try a piece of plaice proved difficult I’m not sure this was because they thought they wouldn’t like it or if they felt to uncomfortable to take a free sample.

I have also drawn up four personas of my regular Wednesday night customers. They all have their rituals and all get the exact same order every week. 

This make me think that it may prove difficult to get people to change their habits and try a new type of fish. So maybe it’s not these customers I should target maybe it will be the more adventurous younger generation who are a bit bored of their local chippy, these may be the customers that will want a shark supper? 

Customer vs. Consumer

Who is the customer? Who is the consumer? In advertising it’s very important to know the difference and keep them in mind when marketing a product.

The customer is the person who pays for and buys the product. The consumer is the person who will ultimately be using it, consuming. It’s not just about making the person who wants to use the product happy. You have to make the customer like the product as well or they won’t part with their cash. Children’s cereals are a good example of this, the child won’t eat the cereal if it doesn’t appeal to them but the parent won’t buy it if they don’t think it’s nutritional enough for their child. ‘Coco Pops’ with its bright yellow box and a friendly adventurous, smiling monkey in the advert stands out as a cereal that is marketed directly at children. Children are drawn in by the bright colours, the fun ad.s and the fact they get to have chocolate in the morning! The adverts are like a very short kids T.V. programme, the monkey battles an evil villain and saves the day within a minute.  All this will be very memorable for the child who will then try to persuade their, mum or dad to buy ‘Coco Pops’ on the next shopping trip. But ‘Coco Pops’ doesn’t forget about the parents in their marketing strategy as they know they are the customer. The advert tells the parent the cereal is high in fibre therefore good for your kids, convincing the parent to buy.

Other examples are; toothpaste, washing powder, milk. Someone goes to the supermarket to buy these items but other people in the household will consume them. A man buying an engagement ring for his girlfriend is the customer; the girlfriend will be the consumer, if she says yes of course!

Customer and consumer differ when it comes to Business to Business (B2B). B2B is where one business sells to another. A business that purchases a product from a retailer is called the consumer even although they will sell the product on and are not the ones who will ultimately use the product. Both businesses in this case must think of the end user and who will buy the product. B2B goods are usually goods that will be sold for the buying business to incorporate into their own products, for example a baker may buy a bag of flour that he will then use for making the cakes he will sell in his shop.