Taking on the Role of Your Customer
creativity customer focus listening text blog Aug 12, 2021
A Theatre Artist's Insight into Customer Persona: Part Two
(Originally published in the Differentiated Studio- June 2021)
Imagine driving yourself and a group of young people you adore to the local roller rink. You plan to have an "old-school" afternoon showing them how fun skating can be.
Do you hop into the car with your rollerskates already on and begin to drive?
Of course not! That would be a huge and dangerous mistake.
To be effective, you have to do things in the correct order. First, get your gang safely to the rink. Next, put on your skates.
Unfortunately, when it comes to Differentiation and customer experience, many of us are starting in the wrong place. We are starting by thinking about our customers.
And that is not the right place to start.
Rather than only thinking about our customers, we need to teach ourselves to think like our customers.
One fun way to do that is to pretend that theatre artists asked to portray our customers on stage. Creating a character for the stage is remarkably similar to the process of understanding a customer.
And it starts with an embodiment.
Theatre artists are trained to answer discovery questions in the first person. Instead of looking at a character in a play and asking what "they" are feeling or doing, theatre artists assume the character's identity for a moment. Actors seek to step inside the character's body and see the world through their eyes.
They explore the "world of the play," and from the point of view of the character, they ask:
- If I were in these circumstances, what might I be thinking and feeling and doing?
- What factors in my history, environment, and needs drive my actions and outlook?
- What are the forces acting on me that are impacting my options and decisions?
As they do this, good theatre artists seek to dig deeper continually. They do not accept the first and most obvious answer. Instead, they keep looking for more profound and more unexpected levels of discovery.
Actors use this, and a host of other physical and emotional techniques, to achieve a state that theatre artists refer to as "living truthfully in imaginary circumstances."
The idea is highly relevant to business strategy.
Great organizations combine research and data with insight and imagination until they can fully understand their customers' circumstances. They may not know every customer by name, but they know the "character" of their customers so well that they come to know the "truth" of their customer's experiences.
They can connect with their customers to provide unique experiences and fill needs their competitors are not filling.
In most instances, this level of insight doesn't magically or organically happen.
It takes some effort and a process.
That is where the actor's toolbox and the actor's studio (or, in our case, the Differentiation Studio) is helpful.
We Need to Step Into the Studio and Take Risks
The exciting news is that fostering creative insights does not mean you need to sit around waiting for inspiration to hit you.
All arts disciplines have processes that their practitioners use to encourage insight and skill development. But, of course, hard work is still involved, and you will run into stuck spots, dead ends, and frustrations the way you do in any meaningful human endeavor.
And, if you stick with the process and allow yourself to take risks and fail along the way, you can often come out on the other end with exciting new insights and opportunities.
The first part of the process starts with awareness and openness.
Instead of beginning with a specific result in mind, simply explore. Allow yourself to start by spending some time without distractions or pressure.
Take a walk, or grab your journal and begin by revisiting the questions I outlined above. Then, simply give yourself a quiet moment to allow yourself to become more curious about how your customer views their world. Seek to see things through their eyes.
Imagine If…
Imagine that you are the Executive Director of a Writing Studio in a small city.
Suppose that in the past, you have identified your customers as middle-aged professionals who seek to develop their writing skills for a creative outlet and personal fulfillment, and your competitors as other organizations in your city that offer writing instruction.
You may have even occasionally considered other creative and artistic classes as part of your competitor base and mused about how to attract more young people and more people from diverse populations to your studio.
But your thinking is still stuck in an old model of looking at your customer from the outside-in. This will make it perilously easy to keep thinking about what you have already done and making many small (and possibly contradictory) tweaks to your offerings.
It will be hard to generate the insights that lead to a genuinely fresh look at your obstacles and opportunities and develop a bold and compelling new strategy.
It will be hard to differentiate.
But you can open up new possibilities by taking a new approach.
What If:
- You began by creating a safe space to take risks and challenge your thinking to explore an imaginary future customer from the inside out?
- You pretended that you were an actor getting ready to play the part of your prospective customer in a play and had to get to know them deeply and intimately?
- You had some handy questions to prompt you into thinking both deeply and differently?
Let's try it out.
Instead of starting with the idea that our customers are "middle-aged professionals who seek to develop their writing skills for a creative outlet and personal fulfillment,"- let's try creating a character of our focus customer.
We are not trying to think about all our customers, or even most of our customers. We are taking a deep dive into one customer and paying with the idea of "becoming" that customer for a short while.
We will walk through some questions. And as we do so, we will work on trusting our imagination to explore these questions without worrying about getting the "right" answer. Some of our responses may come from research, internal organizational data, or what we know about existing customers, and some of them may come from pure conjecture and fantasy.
That is OK. There are no correct answers, only ones that lead to exciting thoughts or opportunities.
The process starts with the question of identity. From the customer's point of view and stated in the first person, we may choose to ask:
- What is my name?
- What are my pronouns?
- Who am I demographically? (age, gender, occupation, race, geography, etc.)
- What cultural norms or expectations do I want to accommodate?
- Is there anything challenging for me about meeting those expectations?
- How do I want others to see me?
- How do I think they actually see me?
- How do I see myself?
- Is there a conflict between how I want others to see me and how I see myself? (For example, "I want others to see me as a polished, professional businesswoman, but I see myself as an underdog and harried mother of 3 who can barely keep it together.")
But we don't stop here. We keep going.
The next step is looking deeply into needs and obstacles. Remembering to answer questions in the first person from the customer's perspective, we ask:
- What do I want in my life, long-term?
- When I wake up on the average Monday morning, what do I most want for that day?
- Why do I want the things I want?
- How must I get those things? (Does it need to look a certain way; do I need to get other things first etc.)
- What do I usually do to get what?
- What other things will I do to get what I want- how far will I go?
- What are the practical obstacles in my way?
- What are the internal obstacles in my way?
- What cultural norms or prejudices must I navigate to get what I want?
- How confident am I in my ability to get my wants and needs met?
Finally, we want to ask ourselves about circumstances and events. From your customer/character's point of view, ask yourself:
- On a typical day, what am I doing?
- On a typical day, what else must I do?
- On a typical day, what outside forces are impacting me?
- What special events or circumstances are going on to make this day (the day they seek your product or service) different from all the days before?
While it takes some time, and you might not get great answers to every question or even understand how every question relates to your context and your customer, just walking through this process can open new ways of thinking.
You may discover, for example, an entire change of organizational identity.
Maybe you were a Writing Studio that serves middle-aged professionals who seek to develop their writing skills for a creative outlet and personal fulfillment.
And perhaps you are becoming a Retreat Center for High Performing Executives who seek to recover from a mid-career crisis by developing their creative capacities and connecting with a community of visionary business leaders.
Anything is possible.
Enjoy it.
And break a leg! (For those of you who don't yet know, that is theatre-speak for Good luck!)