The Importance of Feedback
When running a business or forging a new brand, the goal for every entrepreneur should be to create the best product or service possible; dominate the competition by becoming superior in terms of brand optics, product quality and performance. This is achieved through constantly refining the product or service the business is offering. Similar to a blacksmith creating a blade, testing the steel in fire, and relentlessly shaping and reshaping the pieces of carbon by force until a solid, strong, sharp and long-lasting tool is created.
A company is no different, the forging process and the reshaping blows from the blacksmith’s hammer on the anvil in terms of your business come in the form of feedback, reviews and commentary.
Feedback comes in different forms and could be product reviews either visual, based on product appearance, tactile, the physical feel or use of the brand, and emotional the customer’s overall feeling or mentality after a service or experience. All of which are equally important and afford a company the valuable opportunity to pivot, reshape, innovate and evolve.
Every industry or marketplace changes on the daily, the ability to be flexible, adapt with the times, bend, but not break when a product or industry faces stress is what builds the longevity which separates the great companies we all recognize from the majority of businesses we never hear of as most unfortunately fail within their 1st year.
Through feedback, brands can connect directly with the customer base they are targeting to sell to or engage with and garner valuable information. By putting a product or service out there, it allows for this honest and valuable data to come in freely. It’s important to allow and encourage reviews, by either placing them after an order or incentivize customers to add reviews then rewarding them with and internal benefit such as a discount on their next visit or purchase, thereby collecting information and incentivizing repeat engagement.
Another strategy to promote feedback is to send a new product or one being developed to the target client base either current or future, for free ahead of it’s release. This upfront may seem like a negative, giving away product, however the feedback gathered from the user experience can save endless amounts of money on the back end.
Think of creating a product, ordering hundreds or thousands of units launching them to the market and then sales become stagnant. Reason, something about the product it doesn’t appeal to the customer. Perhaps it’s the branding possibly not communicating the usefulness of the product, or it’s performance, flavoring, presentation and so on that is not resonating with the public. In this example the business has spent thousands on a product that it now is having trouble selling and has to reformulate after the fact to change in order to adapt to consumer sentiment.
Gathering external feedback before a brand launch is of paramount importance, the largest companies we all aspire to be or compete with do so, spending millions of dollars on research and development. They understand the importance and value of feedback and there shouldn’t be a reason why your small business should follow the same example.
A large part of this process most miss, is effectively gathering the data they receive from trials and reviews and correctly implementing it. There are a couple things that lead to this, the most common is businesses disregarding feedback altogether.
Most founders believe if they like a product or service they created or their family or friends enjoy it so will the rest of the world. Nothing could be further from the truth, as a brand looking to grow and scale, a company must realize they need to possess the ability to sell their product or service across large swathes of demographics, age groups, locations and over different seasons. Opinions and reviews from the target customer base they are selling to is always honest and accurate. Even when commentary may seem invective or highly unsatisfactory, those are written by the individuals a business is trying to sell and need to be addressed, heard and adapted to.
The saying the customer is always right, is accurate in this sense, even if you are the inventor or creator of a product or business and don’t like or agree with something the customer base is telling you, does not mean they are wrong and you shouldn’t have to adapt to please them it’s the complete opposite. By not addressing issues raised by the actual people buying or using the product a company can dig itself a hole they may not be able to recover from
As a business owner, many fall into the trap of not having to answer to superiors, they are the boss and call the shots, big decisions rest with them and the power is in their hands Instead, what the best CEOs or founders have understood is that they work for the customer, and the market, it’s not the other way around. If the brand or product doesn’t give people what they want, the consumer will gladly move on to something or someone else in a heartbeat.
The market is brutal, it’s disloyal, greedy and selfish, especially towards a new business first trying to break in. If they are not catered to, the consumer will walk out at the drop of a dime, and without them no business can survive. Learn to embrace feedback, criticism, and advice, the faster entrepreneurs begin to actively listen the swifter and long-lasting their growth will be.
To gain personalized guidance for your business on this topic and others contact us.
- Vince Calace
CEO - Venture Business Development