Week 3 - Researching and Understanding Customers

I believe my company understands its customers.  I work for Carrier, and we sell many things, but my segment of the business deals with residential furnaces.  Our end customers are home owners who desire to live in a warm house when it’s cold outside.  Carrier understands that most of these customers had little to no input deciding which furnace sits in their house.  Most customers just want the big metal box to work and do its job efficiently.  By and large, our end customers do not have a particular brand loyalty.  I believe this point was proven recently during a friendly chat with a neighbor. 

This neighbor, who works in marketing, made the statement that my company was failing at marketing our products because he didn’t know anything about them.  He said he had just replaced his old furnace and was not even aware of the fact that Carrier sold furnaces!  So surely our company was failing at targeting home owners in his situation.  I work in Finance, so I didn’t want to get into defending Carrier’s marketing strategy with a marketing guy, so I chose not to argue with him.  But, I did ask him what brand of furnace he ended up purchasing for his home.  I said, “Was it a Lennox, Trane or Bryant”?  He paused for a while and then said, “I actually don’t know what brand it is”.  Oh, OK then!

Carrier is aware of this, so while they are not our end customers, we pay particular attention to researching the needs of our dealers.  Quick overview of our business: Carrier builds furnaces, sends them to distributors, distributors sell them to dealers, dealers are the people home owners and builders call to install and service furnaces.  Dealers are our salesmen.  Dealers make money selling and servicing furnaces.  So, recently we started designing furnaces that cater to the needs of our dealers.  Dealers want furnaces that are not time consuming to install and service.  So, to find out how we can design a better furnace for our dealers we researched the specific problems they encountered on the job site.  Then we addressed their concerns by incorporating job site specific fixes into the design of our new furnace.  Most of the modifications are things a home owner would never notice.  We hope a preference for working on our product will create brand loyalty among dealers.  Once we create brand loyalty amongst the dealer community the theory is they will be more likely to sell and recommend our product to the real end customer.