The Strategist

Super customers and why you should get to know them



02/08/2018 - 13:31



Marketing expert Eddie Yoon has identified the segment of super consumers in the crowd of users. They are distinguished by their attitude. Super consumers are incredibly enthusiastic and interested, and perhaps even slightly obsessed with a certain category of goods. Someone knows everything about sneakers and keeps dozens of pairs. Others - sports fans - wear T-shirts with numbers of players of their favorite team and collect souvenirs with autographs. Others adore bacon, chops and other dishes from pork and are ready, by their own expression, to grunt. Eddie Yoon tells what benefit can be drawn from this category of buyers.



bruce mars via pexels
bruce mars via pexels
Emotional buyers

Super consumers are not random eccentrics. These are emotional buyers. Internal values lie at the heart of their decisions to purchase. For example, the super consumer of Gatorade buys products of this brand not just because they like their taste. For him, Gatorade symbolizes hard work: drinks, chewing gum and protein bars Gatorade help to recover faster after a hard workout. The super consumer "hires" Gatorade to work to improve their results. Devotion to the brand correlates with a broader life goal - to prepare for a marathon. This buyer is deeply involved. He wants to "be like Mike" (Michael Jordan is the face of the company's advertising campaign). The secret is that each category reflects similar values for each super consumer. And you can make your product appealing to them.

This statement is true for any super consumers. A collector of American Girl dolls with their help wants to establish relationships with her grandchildren and spend more time with her family. A fan of no-name brands sees them as a way to save money and at the same time to buy quality products.

Super consumers are a heterogeneous group, and it is not easy to identify them. But thanks to Nielsen, Eddie Yoon and his colleagues from The Cambridge Group gained access to a huge volume of data about what people are watching and buying. This is the US Homescan database. It includes about 100 thousand American households that agreed to process data on their purchases for all indicators, including bar codes. Yoon and the team analyzed buying behavior and demographic characteristics in more than 125 categories of consumer goods with aggregate sales of over $ 400 billion. Then they found out what people feel about a particular category of goods. They asked why they appreciate them so much. Thanks to Jeff Eastman, the head of the Homescan direction in Nielsen, hundreds of household answers were available for research: what benefits they are looking for, what emotions they are experiencing and what goals they are pursuing.

Finally the researchers found what drives these people and makes them support their beloved brands.

The biggest benefit from super consumers is reduced to simple math. There are not so many, usually about 10% of buyers of a particular product or category. But super-consumers can provide 30-70% of sales, an even larger share of profits and usually up to 100% of new ideas.

In addition to solvency, super consumers have experience and an unusual look at the product. Their interest in new areas and forms of application will benefit companies building innovative capacity.

Super consumers know what they want. They are good at experiencing novelties. With them, you can eliminate most of the innovative risks, experiment more often and expand opportunities.

Five features of super consumers

More than a new name for large consumers

Unlike the latter, super consumers combine significant expenses with strong interest, including in the new application of the product.

Every company has them

According to Eddie Yoon’s information, every category of consumer goods and many other segments has such buyers.

Emotional interest

After talking with super consumers, you will realize that most people have a reasonable explanation for their behavior. These people see in a particular category more sense and benefit than other consumers. In fact, almost everyone is a super consumer of a product.

They are easy to find

Social networks will help to identify these customers.

They want to buy even more ... and lead the rest of your audience

Super consumers provide the company at least three times more growth than ordinary consumers. And they affect millions of people through social networks and "word of mouth".

Super users can work for you, too. Achieving success is not so difficult. In most cases, any retail company has such customers. The main thing is to find them and learn to listen to them.

Based on “Superconsumers. A Simple, Speedy, and Sustainable Path to Superior Growth” by Eddie Yoon