The latest opinion-piece from BrandHook Founder Pip Stocks as recently published on CMO Australia’s online blog: 

We all know the digital revolution has completely transformed the way consumers are interacting with brands, and that a lot of businesses are finding it hard to catch up.

One way to closing this brand gap is to understand consumer behaviour and build a brand experience that meets these new needs. But with consumers evolving and changing, how do you as the CMO, lead a team of marketers to make sense of the chaos of this new ‘path to purchase’?

At BrandHook, we encourage our clients to look for and get ready for a new emerging tribe we have coined The Entrepreneurial Consumer. Why? Because they are setting the tone for this new world.They are behaving in the way most consumers will in future and they are leaders among their peers.If you understand these consumers, you will be able to build a customer experience for them and build a powerful brand experience.

Sometimes called Presumers or Prosumers, we are seeing this entrepreneurial behaviour sit mostly among Mums and Millennials but how do you recognise them? Look out for these four behaviours:

1. As expected, they are super connected. The Entrepreneurial Consumer is ‘publishing’ their own content daily, which makes them highly influential with their peers. They are researching, browsing, chatting, watching and sharing memories, stories, photos and opinions on a variety of brands and topics. There is tribe identified through KRC Research in the US called Millennial Mums, who each have an average of 3.4 social network accounts, compared to the 2.6 accounts the average mum has, while also spending 17.4 hours per week on those sites, almost four hours more than the average mum.
2. A new type of convenience is expected from the Entrepreneurial Consumer, who wants brands to fulfil their needs quickly. This cohort is always chasing more time and they want real time interaction and in fact, want brands to predict their wants. Kissmetrics.com reports that in the US, 40 per cent of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load and a 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7 per cent reduction in conversions.
3. Another behaviour linked to the time poor perception is that the Entrepreneurial Consumer has very little patience for a not-so-perfect customer experience. This year’s McKinsey’s Customer Experience Study shows 25 per cent of everyday customers will deflect after just one bad brand experience. From what we have seen with this Entrepreneurial tribe, this figure is much higher.
4. Finally, The Entrepreneurial Consumer loves a brand. They love a brand like we loved brands in the old days. But this time they love a brand because if it is true to its essence, it will solve problems for them and support their own values. According to the Havas Prosumer report in January this year, 84 per cent of Prosumers believe brands have a responsibility to do more than just generate a profit.

Not only are they spending more hours online than other consumers, this also drives them to adapt to new technologies quicker than others. Augmented reality, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and robotics – all an essential part of the ‘connected home’ we keep hearing about – will be adopted by this crowd earlier than others because it gives them more stories to share.

The success of subscription models, crowdsourcing delivery methods, new distribution channels are delivering convenience and a better experience for this tribe.They love the new and shiny especially if it makes their lives easier.

To battle this, brands need to deliver effortless experiences, personalisation to engage and solve their consumers’ problems.

Entrepreneurial Consumers are looking for brands to stand for something bigger than product benefits. They want brands to bring a point of view to something, have a clear purpose and take action to make an impact. Globescan conducted a study this year with what they call Aspirational Consumers (attitudinally and demographically the same as Entrepreneurial Consumer) and found that nearly six in ten globally say they “trust global companies to act in the best interest of society” (58 per cent), compared with 48 per cent of all consumers.

Attracting the Entrepreneurial Consumer

Helping The Entrepreneurial Consumer continue to be superconnected through the utilisation of new technology is a key… read full article