8 trading companies around the world with annual sales turnover of more than 7 billion euros, 3 research centers, 18 factories that produce 700 thousand tons of product per year, 22 thousand employees, sales in 50 countries. Impressive? Definitely. Nowadays it’s difficult to find someone who doesn’t know the Ferrero Company. For the last 75 years the company has been producing such products as Raffaello, Nutella, Tic Tac, Kinder Chocolate and Ferrero Rocher every day. One and the same person created all of them and the company as well. The name of this person was Michele Ferrero. From the very beginning the head of the company paid special attention to the creation of new products. He was deeply interested in only one thing: if Valerie would enjoy this new product? Who was that mysterious Valerie? She was not his mother, wife or even daughter. It was some kind of imaginary person who combined all the features of Italian house wife, who goes shopping and decides whether to buy the product or not. He constantly wondered what this woman really wanted? How did she live? In what way did she want to indulge herself? What did she buy to her children?
Ferrero said that his secret of success was very simple – to think outside the box and not to disappoint Valerie.
Did you find your Valerie\Kate\Natasha\Isabelle\Charlotte? Do you know what does she like? What is she trying to find while she is going shopping every Saturday? How does she spend her free time? How does she spend her money? How does she treat her children? If no, then I have to disappoint you. It is the first thing to do after the brilliant idea of your start-up came to your mind. How to do it in the most effective way?
That is easy: turn to experts. Find people who can carry out a sociological study in a qualitative manner and be ready to spend money on it. Remember that every dollar spent at this stage can become a million in a year. The fastest and most effective way is to conduct several focus groups. The focus group should include strangers of different ages, professions and interests. They will be the first people to meet your product and give their unprejudiced and honest opinion about it.
But if you don’t have enough money to conduct sociological research, ask your relatives, friends and colleagues to help you. Test your product on them. But! Before starting, ask them to be as frank as possible and to say what they really think about your product, but not what they think you want to hear.
After having identified your target audience, carefully analyze it: age, profession, gender, interests, values, experience in using the Internet, the requests to Google, the availability of social networks and so on. As soon as you cope with this task, make your Valerie alive in your head and meet her.
“Will my potential client quickly find the information he/she wants?”
And the last step left – create a good, useful, picturesque and efficient website. And when you visit your site once again ask yourself: “Will my potential client quickly find the information he/she wants?”. To answer this question, you have to simulate his/her behavior. And here the method of persons and scripts will help you. This method is widely used in Web marketing. What does it mean? You should create an individual script for each type of potential visitor and divide it into successive steps. These steps should be considered as questions that the user can ask.
And if you answer all these questions, then your Valerie/Kate/Natasha/Isabelle/Charlotte will definitely put your product in her basket.