Meet today's consumer: The new chameleon

- [Narrator] Why is our urge to put our customers into tidy categories so pervasive? Well, one simple answer is that this is the way our brains work. Psychologists know that when we encounter a new object or person, within milliseconds, our immediate response is to assign it to a category, good or bad, weak or strong, binary code, zero or one, regular or decaf, ready to wear, or haute couture, swipe left or swipe right. If you stop to think about it, just about everything, you know, belongs to a category. In some cases, your brain has done the heavy lifting of assigning an object a label, but often each of us simply obeys pre-existing structures our culture has already taught us. So our culture makes distinctions between different times of the day, such as between leisure and work hours, as well as among genders, occasions, groups of people and so on. And the marketing system conveniently provides us with the products that signify these categories. For example, the clothing industry gives us labels to denote when we should wear certain attire such as formal, business professional, business casual, resort wear, and even shudder casual, Fridays. It labels itself in other ways to denote price points and suitable age groups for the garments, such as haute couture, designer, ready to wear, bridge or contemporary. Now these taxonomic structures, often are logical, comprehensive and quite useful. The problem is they don't necessarily mirror how people actually think. Unless we've been trained to follow a certain system, we're likely to come up with other ways to sort out what we know. We may develop folksonomies instead of taxonomies. These are sets of labels or tags that individuals choose in a way that makes sense to them as opposed to using predefined keywords. So for example you may sort your own clothing inventory in your own way perhaps with labels that make sense to you such as good for going out, out of style, or even no longer fits. As customers create their own knowledge structures, they may be comparing purchase alternatives that don't necessarily track the way that professionals view their competitors. It's common today for a brand to create a fictional profile of a core customer who inspires product design and communications decisions. Marketers refer to these profiles as buyer personas, but the hitch is that consumer chameleons take on multiple identities, sometimes in the course of a day. That's why it's important to recognize that your brand persona is more likely several personas. That's because different versions of your customer may emerge on different occasions. The persona you painstakingly create to understand the primary buyer of say, industrial equipment is probably not the same person who heads to a club after she clocks out of the office. This ever-changing customer is one reason that many organizations today buy into the idea of creating customer journey maps. A mapping project involves a very precise tracking of the experiences your customers actually have when they interact with your product store or service. An important goal of mapping is to identify the pain points that they encounter along the way to maximize the positivity of the experience. This mapping process involves several steps, but probably the most important one is take the customer journey yourself. Too many times managers sit in their offices and just imagine what their customers must be experiencing. But it's only by living through the experience in their shoes that you can truly appreciate the problem. So remember fish where the fish are.