Who is Your Customer?

Getting in Front of the Right People

Knowing your customer is harder than it seems, especially in the built environment, where decisions move through a web of influencers, specifiers, sellers, and buyers. Too often, companies lean on outdated assumptions or anecdotes and miss a market that’s evolving fast. Leaders need proprietary insights into how customers think, behave, and decide. Defining your customer is a strategic choice that shapes positioning and value. In constant disruption, the real question is how quickly you’re learning about them.

Who is your customer? On the surface, the answer to this question may seem obvious, especially for a business that’s no longer a startup. But what do you really know about the people you serve?

Our industry research, along with insights from our client work, shows that understanding customer decision-makers is among marketers’ top concerns. Your brand or message may appeal to some people, but are they the ones you need? Who is the decision maker versus an informed party in this process? The reality of purchasing within built environments is often a complex web of influencers, hierarchies, and processes. Many companies struggle to understand the changing market landscape and are unsure how their customers make decisions, making it harder to prioritize their target audience.

There is no single answer to this question, but solutions come from updated information and hard choices.

Current Insights

Many companies that have been around for a decade or more operate on autopilot. They’ve devised a system that works, or has worked. When faced with new challenges, they revert to the old playbook. Sometimes that works. Other times, when a mature industry must respond to the changing nature of work, industry consolidation, and value chain collapse, you need a new plan.

Autopilot works best when conditions don’t change. With little change, companies grow comfortable with their understanding of customer needs and the decisions they’ve made to address them. However, technology disruption, changing trade policy, and accelerating post-pandemic work trends have laid the groundwork for a new era. This doesn’t even account for generational shifts, as ThinkLab notes that the average age of a seller is 55 and that of a design specifier is 25.

Our industry insights indicate that 74% of the information leaders act upon is anecdotal – mostly conversations with reps, dealers, salespeople. Anecdotes are helpful, and conversations are essential, but relying too heavily on them risks missing the full story. Would you like your airline pilot to rely on an unchanging flight plan in a storm? Incomplete information can lead to poor decisions. And while half of your competitors also rely on third-party industry research, that just means you have the same data as everyone else. Industry baselines help you keep up, but they’re less helpful when you want to get ahead.

You can never know enough about your customer. It’s important to remember that in the age of information, customer insights are paramount. While Google, Amazon, and Netflix are technology innovators and industry disruptors, a significant source of their value lies in their deep understanding of their customers. These companies know more than anyone about the people they serve. They may know even more about us than we do ourselves.

Customer preferences are changing, so commit to keeping up with them. There are risks in not keeping up with how they change, and second-hand information is unreliable. It’s why we advocate for user research, which differs from market research, emphasizing not only today’s demographics but also behaviors, aspirations, and unarticulated, unmet needs. People don’t always know what they truly need, and it’s common for customers to be unable to tell you directly, even when asked.

Plan and budget for efforts to gather, interpret, and act on new insights that build on widely available industry data, but also collect your own proprietary insights. Efficient manufacturing is a difficult challenge, but not a market differentiator.

A new metric for the information age is: How fast are we learning?

Who’s On First?

The built environment specification process is complicated enough even without changing market dynamics. There is an array of audiences and sales approaches to address before we even get off first base.

Dealers play a critical role in facilitating most transactions, so they are a good place to start. Seller-led approaches are common in B2B, and some manufacturers choose to view dealers or distributors as their sole customers, crafting messages and incentives to keep their brands at the forefront. Within the dealership itself, some companies target dealer principals who negotiate brand relationships at a high level and designers who have agency on day-to-day projects. While new technology and evolving business models are evolving the role of the dealer, dealers themselves are evolving their business models to be less dependent on traditional sources.

Smaller, non-dealer-aligned (non-exclusive) manufacturers often rely on sales representatives. While some sales reps are employed directly by manufacturers, many are part of independent rep groups. Independent rep groups are separate companies that manage relationships with manufacturers, dealers, and buyers. They, too, have audience diversity among firm principals and independent sellers.

A focus on dealers, independent reps, internal sales reps, or some combination can comprise a seller-driven strategy, often with the push of built-in financial incentive structures. A win-win seller approach can be a powerful growth driver.

Conversely, focusing on A&D (architects and designers) is often more of a pull strategy. Designers are not compensated by the sale itself and have different incentives. They are motivated by innovation, novelty, creativity, and other conceptual issues. Designer-led brands focus on brand, tone, aesthetics, product form, and function.

Designers themselves are not a homogeneous group. First, architects (“A”) differ from interior designers (“D”). Each plays a different role at a different time in the specification process. Architects are more connected with building infrastructure, walls, floors, and ceilings, which happen sooner, whereas interior designers are focused on space division, furniture, accessories, and finishes, which happen later. Then, while many designers rely on the famous mantra, “form follows function,” others truly lean one way or the other. While the goal is balance, some designers focus more on performance, and others focus more on style.

An influencer-led strategy may lead with designers, but they aren’t the only group to satisfy. There are a host of other influencer groups within the built environment specification, encompassing ergonomics, neuroinclusivity, acoustics, sustainability, health, workplace performance, technology, FF&E, procurement, and buying groups. Depending on your niche, market segment, and product offering, these groups aren’t just outliers; they can be gatekeepers.

Real estate companies add yet another layer of complexity and increasing influence. Not only do they play a role in location scouting, capacity planning, and building inventory access, but they also have direct end-customer relationships and diversity across their team, from leadership to space utilization.

Then, there are the actual wallet holders, the people who write the checks and buy the products. There are different audiences within these groups stemming from facility management, including the C-Suite. The desire to create branded company experiences often involves marketing, and the tension between WFH (work-from-home) and RTO (return-to-office) accelerated the trend to include human resources.

Last but not least are the end users – the people who use the products. While they play a role in the narrative of sellers, designers, and other influencers, they are a group that often doesn’t have as much of a voice as they might. That might be changing. With people working from home nearly 30% of the time, employers with facilities are looking to entice them back to the office.

Individual workers are also consumers and may be looking for home-office products elsewhere. As they do, mainstream design influencers and content creators are playing a larger role, far afield from traditional B2B sellers, A&D, and industry influencers. This B2B/B2C blur reshapes overall market expectations and customer experience, including influence, specification, purchasing, installation, and maintenance.

This list of audiences is not exhaustive. It doesn’t even address the complexities of market segments and other groups. Some experienced industry professionals only see parts of the picture, so it’s no surprise that identifying the customer can be a challenge.

A Strategic Choice

It’s impossible to target all of these groups. While many of the largest competitors with resources will try, even they will need to prioritize one audience over another. Nearly every other brand, niche by comparison, will need to target a particular segment. Each must identify, understand, and prioritize all the audience players, then deliver a message to the ones most influential for their business.

Choosing a target audience begs a vital question about company positioning. To whom will your brand be most meaningful? An informed choice begins with unique insights into what is happening in the market at 50,000 feet and on the ground with real people. Knowing how they interact with one another and how their world is changing is vital to identifying your target audience.

Your value proposition starts with understanding what your target audience values. How that audience is defined is up to you.