THE 1 reason customers will kill your business.

The one reason people send you broke is not ‘everyone’ is your customer.  The people you think are your customers are not.

I recently had a blog published on the Food SA blog page.  I talked about the importance of being customer centric, not product centric.

Our passion for what we do is why we all leap out of bed in the morning; or perhaps never made it to bed.

But a challenge I see for South Australia’s food fanatics, is to get better at balancing this passion with a better understanding of who you are doing it all for and why.

Bill Cosby once said “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”

Why is this so important for foodies?

Because if your approach is that ‘everyone’ is your customer, it’s not clear to the people that actually matter they are meant to choose you.

Speaking of identifying customer segments, a recent Daily Stat from the Harvard Business Review Blog Network reminds us products that benefit children, usually mean they will be a lifelong fan of the brand.

Looking around South Australia’s food industry, I wonder where all the innovative products for kids are?!

Perhaps after reading this blog someone will have a light-bulb moment.

Get it right and the underage market can be very profitable.  Working on the premise that you need to charge for value to make money, then the underage market is lucrative because the parent pays for value and also adds a ‘value premium’ because it’s for their children.

Bugaboo completely nailed this concept – in what was a very congested market.  Here’s their story.

Lastly, being customer centric will also reduce your costs; especially in the area of wastage.  A new Cooperative Research Centre to Cut Food Waste will soon be launched by the CSIRO in collaboration with a consortium from Food SA.

Whilst it hasn’t been mentioned in the initial information about the CRC, I strongly believe that also teaching businesses how to be more customer-centric will reduce the amount of food that is wasted.

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