This morning I attended the third of a series of breakfast seminars from the Ingenuity Programme where Duncan Shaw and Peter Tolmie gave us some taster information about better understanding our customers in advance of the workshop they will be running next year.

Peter introduced us to the concept of ethnography, originally a branch of anthropology that involved getting in among the people that the scientist was studying - "getting down from the verandah" as it was known.  Today, it also applies to an approach to understanding human behaviour that involves observing and noting from a position within that group's culture.  And that group can include your customers.

Watch Peter's talk...
The advantage with the approach is that you get to observe what your customers actually do, rather than what they would report doing were you to ask them.  In this way you can spot the things that actually prompt buying decisions (what exactly causes the frustration that your product addresses? what is it about a decision-making process that takes so long?) as well as looking at issues that might affect your customer care policies and processes.

The thing that struck me was that, whilst we all know that "understanding our customers" is a good thing, it is all to easy in practice to make assumptions or to gloss over the issues that might provide the real - and perhaps surprising - insights into how customers behave in particular circumstances and settings.  This approach, if properly tailored to a small business' resources, could prove extremely powerful. 

Peter and Duncan (I'll blog about Duncan's A, B and C customer profiling at a later date) will be running a Profitable Customers workshop on these significant insights into customers and their behaviour - and how understanding these issues can help you identify and serve more of the more profitable ones - on Tuesday 16 February 2010.  I'm planning on being there - you might want to be too.