Businesses must quickly tap into consumer trends 

For some consumers such as the millennials, what is new today, is old tomorrow! Tapping into such consumer behaviour is no mean feat and requires businesses to keep changing marketing strategies to keep abreast with fast paced consumer trends and behaviour. 

Alexander Kyokwijuka, a marketing expert, says it is crucial to carefully analyse customer insights, know where to gather them from, pick the right ones, and integrate them into decision-making across the organisation. 

Consumer mind-connecting

Apple, the manufacturer of Iphone, is one global tech company that has built a connection with its consumers that has gone way beyond the simple emotional, keeping many on tenterhooks for their upcoming product in store. It has succeeded by actually connecting with their minds. 

However, the business model doesn’t stop there. Apple creates prelaunch excitement for its products through tantalising announcements at Macworld, showcasing the product to hard-core fans months before launch and typically after subtle leaks have already aroused interest. This is revealed in the new book, The New Rules of Retail: Competing in the World’s Toughest Marketplace by Robin Lewis and Micheal Dart. 

 In Uganda, Café Javas, a restaurant in Kampala, has tapped into consumer trends using the neurological or emotional connection.

Ian Ortega, a social media critic who recently gave a review of the restaurant’s business marketing model during Covid-19 lockdown noted that the business quickly adapted without a compromise on quality and kept on delivering quality food to its loyal clientele despite a lockdown.

He puts it this way. He says, “For Café Javas, they don’t look at it as a cash transaction, they look at it as building a relationship for life. They want to earn your loyalty for a lifetime. They don’t mind making a loss in the short-term if that will make them have you forever.” 

Robin Lewis writes that consumer connectivity is no longer about merely the physical or practical connection of products or services with consumers. Neurological connectivity is achieved when a retailer, brand or service creates a strong psychological and emotional response that operates on a subconscious level for the consumer in a way that is typically not readily understood nor necessarily recognised by the consumer.

A person who wishes to produce for the market must ensure to understand the consumer behaviour trends, such as a given sector they want to produce for, or a given market so that it can be incorporated in the product development process so that the product befits the customer.

Kyokwijuka explains that tapping into consumer emotions and trends is simply to keep innovating new products and services. He reasons that this by and large may give a prediction of what a consumer may need in the next coming years.

 “A careful look at consumer trends as a business person can determine the pattern of consumption and forecast what a customer may need and based on their behaviour, they will pay for the product,” he says.

Digitisation

Digitisation creates an opportunity to reduce cost by reducing reliance on agents and creating personal and direct connection with customers. This has also accelerated and created a possibility that customers can be enticed on the new product depending on their preferences.

According to Dereck Tuhairwe, currently dealing in construction materials, depending on the nature of media you are using in regards to promoting your business, you are able to catch a bigger market.

Tuhairwe who largely uses Facebook and WhatsApp uses digital marketing analytics on Facebook which can easily tell you which age/ market group he wants to target. 

Tuhairwe says once the right clients have been targeted, they on most occasions will contact the company by themselves. This, for Tuhairwe, gives him a fairly right market. 

Investment in customer analytics enables everything from online prospecting to better customer segmentation to advanced techniques in data-driven underwriting.

Using Google and social media analytics to tap in what consumers want and expect, will help companies navigate and help drive growth.

Connecting to the consumer’s mind     

Some businesses are tapping into the neurological and emotional way of how consumers react to their products to adapt the fast changing but also unpredictable behaviour of consumers in the digital age. It is simply creating a cult of addicts by building this deep connection with consumers.  But also this goes down to quality.