Consumer profiling: The complete guide

Did you know 95% of product launches fail? It’s true. All that creative energy and money down the drain. The surprising thing is most of those failed product launches can credit their flops to a lack of market research. 

As a savvy market research professional, you know there’s no such thing as too much customer knowledge. When you build a consumer profile that defines your ideal customer, you create frameworks for successful products and marketing campaigns.

In this article, I’ll share a full guide on consumer profiles. We’ll cover what a consumer profile is and how you can create or build on your existing ones, plus examples of good consumer profiles to guide your marketing. 

A customer or consumer profile is a detailed description of your customer’s preferences, behaviors, needs, and characteristics. 

To create these, research professionals layer social sciences like psychology, sociology, and statistics over business school economics. As marketing and customer insight tools evolve, heatmaps and other detailed analytics are used to create a well-rounded customer profile. 

Big brands like PepsiCo have market research teams dedicated to knowing what customers want. But even small brands can use new technology to help them get to know their customers better. 

For example, imagine you want to add a new flavor to your best-selling ice cream line. You could scrawl flavor ideas on a whiteboard and vote on them, or you could survey your customers about their favorite flavors. Which do you think is a smarter choice? 

“For a new shake flavor, I analyze the drivers of interest & purchase in all the shakes we’ve tested before. I can see how consumers play those concepts back, & what they want us to do differently. There’s a lot I can do easily with the data set.”

- Matt Cahill, Senior Director, Consumer Insights Activation at McDonald's

And customer profiles work for B2B and B2C companies. If you’re crafting B2B customer profiles, you’ll focus on the company size, revenue, buying cycle and individual job titles that would use your product or service. And you can create a separate customer profile for decision-makers if they’re not the ones who primarily use your service. 

With B2C customer profiles, you consider your customers' lifestyles, preferences and buying habits. 

Consumer profiling, or customer profiling, shapes your customer’s understanding of your customer. The more you know what makes your customer tick, the fatter the bottom line. 

TechTarget describes customer profiling as “Customer profiling is the detailed, systematic process of constructing a clear portrait of a company's ideal customer by gathering and analyzing information about their demographic, psychographic, and behavioral attributes.”

Basically, a good customer profile is a competitive edge. 

But what else goes into a customer profile? Let’s dive into each of the elements you’ll need to include.

The elements of a customer profile

Unless your company is a brand-new startup, you already have customers, So you probably have some basic demographic information on them and maybe even some of their motivations for buying. Good work! But it’s still worth covering the basics of your consumer profile. Here’s what you’ll need:

1. Demographics:

• Age group

• Location 

• Household makeup

• Education 

• Income level 

• Occupation

• Race/ethnicity 

2. Psychographics

• Lifestyle

• Hobbies 

• Opinions 

• Goals 

• Attitudes 

• Fears

• Dreams 

3. Behavioral 

• Past buying habits 

• Brand engagement level 

• Level of brand loyalty

Don’t worry if you don’t have all the answers right now. Just note what you do know about them and list what you’d like to know more about. 

Customer profile vs. buyer persona

If both involve understanding your customers and why they buy, what’s the difference? 

Your basic customer profile combines demographics, psychographics and behaviors.  

A buyer persona is an imaginary customer. 

You may have encountered personas like “Soccer Mom Sally. She drives a minivan, is a SAHM and has 2.5 kids aged 7-12. Each child is active in school activities and she spends hours every day shuttling her kids from school to activities. She’d like to start working part-time but needs flexibility.” 

Or, “Techy Samantha works as a software engineer and is between 23 and 33 years old. She lives in San Francisco and works for a software startup with 30 to 75 employees. She’s got her eye on a promotion and is actively working on side projects to grow her skills.” 

Personas and profiles do have crossover, but the persona adds a 3-D quality.

“I always call it getting a head start. It's going to make your outcome better. No one's going to care that you got to a great outcome because you used what people did previously and it wasn't all new to the world thinking. No one cares. They just care about the outcome. Give yourself the head start.”

- Matt Cahill, Senior Director, Consumer Insights Activation at McDonald's

As you refine your customer profile, you may uncover new motivations and awareness. Here are three elements to remember:

1. Relevancy

How relevant is your product or service for your ideal customer? Do you sell a “nice to have” or an essential item? Either can work. People register stars as gifts, they buy dish soap and many buy more shoes than they technically “need.” 

All in all, people buy for so many reasons. Ask yourself: Why do your customers buy? 

What about relevancy in B2B? Is your ideal customer profile a marketing manager or team lead? Then, it makes sense to appeal to their needs. Make the case for why your product will save time and money. Share stories and data to make it easy for them to make their case to their boss.

“Can you think of a better way to show your consumer you understand them than by being present in the most relevant areas of their lives?”

- Lauren Stafford-Webb, CMO at SoFi

2. Improved customer experience

Customer experience (CX) gets a lot of press these days, and for good reason. What was your last customer experience? Was it a good one, or did you complain to a friend? Social media is filled with complaints about negative customer experiences. Yet, one B2C company routinely gets positive shoutouts. It’s the online pet retailer Chewy. 

Chewy shows empathy. Sometimes, a customer receives a Chewy order after their dog dies unexpectedly. When they return the unopened dog food, Chewy not only refunds their money, but sends flowers and a sympathy card. And it’s always appreciated. 

3. Personalized communication 

Adding in [First Name] was the first step in email personalization. But in 2024, sophisticated consumers expect more. You’re used to recommendation engines personalized to your tastes. So when you can extend that level of personalization to your customers, you delight them. 

Imagine you’re a spa-loving couple traveling for a weekend getaway. You receive an email offering a great spa package to your hotel’s award-winning spa right after you book your room. 

You’re delighted with this relevant and personalized communication. If they’d offered you a family-friendly package to a local kiddie attraction instead, you’d think it was strange. So it almost goes without saying that it’s worth the effort to show your customers that you do understand them and what they enjoy. 

Now that you’re thinking about your customer profiles, you might think about the broader market segmentation. For example, a bottled iced tea customer is part of a broader category of the drinks market. 

But bottled iced tea is a sizable market. Market Data Forecast reports the iced tea market will reach 79.57 billion by 2029, up from 56.73 billion. 

Think about the Liquid Death iced tea brand, with its edgy name and graphics, on a can. They push the provocative theme with names like Grim Leafer and Rest in Peach. 

It doesn’t take much imagination to think they have a different customer than the Sweet Leaf brand in glass bottles. The grinning white-haired granny on the label evokes an older, more traditional customer profile.

Both are part of the iced tea market segmentation but have very different customer profiles. But it doesn’t end there! You can slice up that market segment even more.

For example, there are different types of teas. 

• Black tea 

• Green tea 

• Flavored tea 

• Herbal tea 

• Caffeinated

• Decaffeinated

You could break it down by types of packaging too. 

• Bottles (glass or plastic) 

• Cans 

• Tea bags 

Once you start fine-tuning your market segmentation, you can see a world of possibilities in your customer profiles. You’ll find some are avid consumers of your products while others are occasional users. Still, others might purchase your product but not be the end user. 

Imagine the mashup of Taco Bell and Cheez-It. The snack food giants paired up to create two new products for their menu: the Big Cheez-It Crunchwrap and Cheez-It Tostada after successful market testing. Two unlikely pairings, resulting in a wider consumer reach for both parties. 

Now that you’re familiar with customer profiling, you might wonder about customer profiling methods. As market researchers, you know there are four primary ways you can learn more about your customers and understand them better. 

1. Geographic 

2. Demographics 

3. Psychographic 

4. Behavioral 

When you go deep into each of these, you can build a customer profile that includes: 

• Lifestyle 

• Hobbies 

• Values

• Attitudes 

• Motivations

With a mix of quantitative and qualitative research, you tie numbers to emotions. This helps you build a better story. And what is successful marketing but a well-told story? 

"They have a scorecard with core KPIs. A-Z marketing don't have many decisions to make from a research point of view so they can easily make it happen."

- Jennifer Picard, Head of Centre of Excellence, Pernod Ricard

Now that you’re thinking about customer profiles and how they can benefit your career, here’s how you can create yours. First, start with customer data.

1. Use a customer profile template

You can choose how you format your consumer profile data. Some like spreadsheets, while others grab an online template. The main thing is to collect the data, analyze it and maintain consistency.

2. Identify customer pain points

Nothing beats talking to your customers. Market research takes many forms, such as support tickets, social media mentions, chatbots and 1:1 interviews. 

3. Segment customers based on pain points

Even cursory research should give you some insight into your customer’s mindset. Some common pain points include: 

• Usability 

• Convenience 

• Pricing 

• Customer support 

As you notice themes, you can group them together. For example, if you sell software and multiple people complain about the onboarding process, then that warrants attention.

4. Identify customer demographics and behaviors

Compare your key pain points with your customer demographics and behaviors. Where are the overlaps? When and where do the bulk of your sales happen? Build on your customer knowledge. Your customer research will uncover new insights. 

5. Gather customer feedback

Customer interviews are the gold standard of market research. Yes, they can take more time, but in the realm of better understanding your customer, they’re well worth the effort.

6. Document customer findings

Use loyalty programs to reward your best customers and understand what matters to them. Segment your ad campaigns based on convenience, support, and other factors to see which matters most to your customers. 

7. Update customer profiles regularly

Never stop learning. Customer preferences are always evolving, which is an opportunity to discover more about your customers. Their tastes can help shape future product lines, ad copy, package design, and everything else about your product. 

Now that you understand the basics of customer profiles, you can get started with a survey and gather consumer research through an agile market research platform like Zappi. Next, review your website analytics and any first-party qualitative and quantitative data you have collected. 

"With Zappi's platform, we have a collaborative workspace where we all have access to the same tests with one click of. button. We have the analysis in one agile space, where we can adapt and change as per your analysis needs."

- Georgina Farmer, Global Insights & Analytics Manager - Intimate Wellness, Reckitt

And don’t forget to talk to your employees. Your employees can have useful opinions about areas for improvement. If they’re in customer service, they hear first-hand the concerns of your customers, all the more reason to involve them in the customer profiles. 

Soon, you’ll have excellent customer profiles to guide your products and marketing!