No two people are alike. This may be a beautiful feature of the human condition, but it is also a recurrent headache of any marketer or sales rep. A strategy that may succeed brilliantly with one lead can be completely disastrous with another. The result is a frustrating volume of uncertainty and confusion, often made worse by ridiculous claims that there is one “perfect” way of selling or marketing. A helpful first step in dispelling this confusion is to reject the idea of a unitary, average, or typical customer. Instead, we might consider customers as falling across a spectrum of behaviour, with two extremes; “browsers” on one end, and “doers” on the other.
“Browsers” vs “Doers”
Ok, what do these terms mean? In the simplest terms, a browser likes to take their time in the buying process, gathering as much information as possible, and considering different options and possibilities. To a certain extent, they actually enjoy the process of selecting and buying a product or service. I’ve named these characters browsers because in my field of web design they love to browse through every page on a site. In a retail context they would be “strollers”, a customer who walks through each section of a shop, out of curiosity if nothing else.
Doers, on the other hand, love to actually “do” their buying. They have a set of requirements for a product or service (quality, features, price etc) and once these are met they will happily check out. They tend to focus on what they actually need, rather than considering every possible eventuality of a purchase. In one sense doers are great for business, but they also pose risks. Any impediment or delay to the sales process will become intolerable to somebody so eager to buy, and a fast decision maker can change their mind as quickly as they make it. When it comes to web design, we have no shortage of doers, with 61% of users leaving a site unless they find what they want within 5 seconds of landing.
Of course, these are extremes of behaviour, and most of us fall in the middle. They are also relative. In a grocery shop everyone is more of a doer, and in a shoe shop we can all be tempted to engage in some browsing. Likewise in a B2B context (high stakes, high information) we might expect more considerate and careful buyers, and at a busy bar (low stakes, time sensitive) we will experience a less patient audience. A range of customer behaviour always exists however, and any marketing campaign needs to accommodate it, no matter the context.
Double marketing
So how do we sell to two audiences at once? The key, where possible, is to provide solutions for one without compromising the experience of the other. For example, a supermarket might provide sandwiches, snacks and drinks near the entrance, allowing hungry arrivals to quickly check out with their lunch, while browsers are free to stroll around the aisles. Generally speaking, treating a doer like a browser (or vice versa) is a dangerous gamble. Consider a browser who gets interrupted by a shop assistant, or a doer who is left waiting too long at a restaurant. Striking a compromise between these two is therefore crucial, as failing to provide for either profile can be costly.
Finding the balance at Kooba
At Kooba, we’ve learned to accommodate these two behavioural profiles through thoughtful and considerate user experience (UX) design. One classic solution is to sandwich a home page between calls to action (CTAs) in the header and footer. Doers can immediately make a purchase or booking at the top of the page, and browsers can make their decision after scrolling to the bottom. Check out our work on holoplot.com to see a great example of this. This is one reason we talk about the “fold” in web design (even if it doesn’t actually exist), as getting important information to the top of a page is vital to converting doers into customers. Likewise an intuitive navigation system allows doers to find what they want quickly, but also lets browsers enjoy the process of exploring a website. A good UX always keeps the full range of customer behaviours in mind, with the aim of retaining and converting as many visitors as possible.
Selling to everyone
No matter how granular and precise a target market might be, it is impossible to sell to a single profile of customer. Quite simply, human beings like to be treated in many different ways during the customer journey. Good marketing, good sales, and good web design should always respect this by building a customer experience that meets the expectations of doers, browsers, and everyone in between.
