The Cycles Exercise For Customer Research

Ahoy, Digital Writers!

If you want your readers, customers, or clients to buy from you, you need to understand them first.

Great products and incredible ideas fall apart when prospects don't feel seen or heard. And the best way to unpack their relevant wants, needs, and desires is with customer research.

The problem?

Most "define your customer" exercises are useless. They don't help you truly understand your customer's life.

Enter Billy Broas.

Billy has been the behind-the-scenes marketing brain to entrepreneurs like Tiago Forte and Ali Abdaal, and is the author of the new book Simple Marketing for Smart People. His specialty is strategic messaging.

And today, he's introducing us to his "Cycles Exercise" for customer research.

It will help you to:

• Nail your marketing message

• Create stronger customer connections

• Build products that fit your customers' lives

Strap in.

Here's Billy:

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Hey there!

Since the dawn of commerce, salespeople and marketers have tried to better understand their customers. You can’t blame them.

As a marketer myself, I’ve experienced how one observation about a customer can deliver an insight that leads to years of profit.

To assist in the pursuit of better customer understanding, all types of tools have been introduced:

• Focus groups

• Customer interviews

• Data analysis

• And more

Each of these tools can be a great contributor to the end goal of customer understanding.

Today, I’d like to introduce you to a new exercise. It’s been so useful to me, my clients, and my students that we’ve adopted it as our guiding North Star in all customer research efforts and training.

No more boring customer avatar exercises for us.

We then discovered that this exercise is turbocharged when combined with tools like ChatGPT.

Ready to learn the exercise and have some fun in ChatGPT?

The Cycles-Based Approach To Customer Research

Here’s an excerpt from my book, Simple Marketing for Smart People, that gives a good introduction to this exercise:

“It’s overwhelming to try and understand everything about a customer’s life. Fortunately for those of us tasked with marketing duties, humans live their lives in cycles. You might also call these rituals, routines, or patterns.”

In our marketing efforts, we can tap into these cycles.

This is best understood by walking through an example.

Example: Parents And The Cycle Of Buying School Supplies

Let’s say our business sells school supplies to parents.

To have success, we must create marketing material that empathizes with parents and speaks to their lived experience. Only then will they choose to buy from us.

The cycles exercise will make our job easier.

We start by looking at a zoomed-out cycle.

Why? This is a critical characteristic of cycles: they’re fractal. Cycles are nested within other cycles, like a Russian Doll—dolls nested within dolls.

In the same way, a cycle of a human’s life almost always occurs within another cycle:

• The cycle of brushing your teeth occurs within the larger cycle of your morning routine

• The cycle of driving to work exists within the larger cycle of the work day

• The cycle of having a baby exists within the larger cycle of marriage

Do you see how cycles exist within cycles?

It’s almost infinite how far you can go in either direction with smaller or larger cycles. This incredible fractal nature of cycles is of huge benefit. By realizing that cycles occur within cycles, we can better understand the context in which our customers behave.

• For our parents whose kids are returning to school, are we examining the cycle of their kid kicking off elementary school— or high school? Because elementary school is not high school.

• If you’re a business, do you think you may speak to these two parents differently? I hope so.

For our upcoming ChatGPT exercise with the school supplies example, we won’t zoom out quite so far to the level of type of school. But we will zoom out one level.

Peek Into The Cycle Of Your Customer’s Life With ChatGPT

Let’s begin our research with the cycle of returning to school after the summer ends.

Step 1: “Zoom Out” To The Larger Cycle In Which Your Product Participates

Here’s the ChatGPT prompt:

I own a business and sell to parents. 

I want to better understand my customers. 

To do so, please help me better understand the cycle of their child returning to school at the end of the summer. 

Give me a list of the 3 - 5 significant phases or milestones in this cycle. 

Present them from the parent’s perspective and keep it succinct.

ChatGPT’s output:

Right away, do you see how studying a cycle is like watching a movie? Can’t you picture this family getting their child ready for school?

The copywriting almost takes care of itself. (More on that at the end.)

Notice I added a red box around the only step that directly applies to our school supplies business. Imagine how much context we’d miss if we only saw that step. Do you see how when we zoom out (i.e. the fractal Russian Doll method) and see this broader picture, we gain valuable context?

We now have a much better understanding of our customer's life.

It’s easy to suffer from tunnel vision in our businesses. We’re so close to our business and products that we become blind to our customers' lives and only pay attention to the small slice in which we directly participate.

But when we zoom out and identify the larger cycles, we have so much more empathy for our customers. When you read that ChatGPT response, it becomes obvious.

Alright, I wanted to give you this zoom-out perspective first, but now, let’s dive into our specific cycle: the cycle of buying school supplies.

Step 2: “Zoom In” To The Cycle Your Product Improves

You can use this in a fresh chat window, but I recommend continuing after you identify the broader cycle. Start broad, then drill down. That way, you’ll know the bigger picture story before you focus on just your product.

ChatGPT Prompt:

Take me deeper into the cycle of purchasing school supplies. 

Give me a list of the 3 - 5 significant phases or milestones in this cycle. 

Present them from the parent’s perspective and keep it succinct.

ChatGPT’s output:

Again, do you see how easy this cycle approach makes it to put yourself in your prospect's shoes?

Your prospect will recognize your empathy, too. When we weave these insights into our messaging, customers begin to say things like, “I feel like you’re speaking directly to me.”

It’s a good feeling when you can make someone feel seen and acknowledged.

3 Business Benefits Of A Cycles-Based Approach To Customer Research

There are many practical business benefits, too, of course. Using this exercise, you can boost your marketing results because you recognize that humans live their lives in cycles, and those cycles are nested inside larger cycles.

This discovery allows you to:

1. Create products that fit your customers' life: Align your product development efforts around the cycles of your customer’s lives. When looking to launch a new product, don’t start with the product—start with the cycle and ask yourself, “Which products does this cycle demand?”. Or, perhaps, “What’s a negative cycle I can eliminate?”

2. Improve marketing by knowing your product's role: Find the cycle in which your product participates. Learn that cycle inside and out. Your new understanding will trickle down to your marketing messaging, the way you talk to prospects—everything.

3. Build a stronger customer connection: Show more empathy by zooming out and noticing the larger cycles in which your product participates. That way, when you communicate with prospects, you take a more holistic approach to your messaging and conversations.

Your next steps are to put this Cycles-Based Approach exercise into action.

Action Plan

Here are five ideas for next steps:

• Email: Write an email that recognizes the larger cycle in which your cycle participates. Even though you don’t directly participate in most of the steps in that larger cycle, by acknowledging them, you’ll show your subscriber you care about them—not just your product. Counterintuitively, this will lead to more sales of your product.

• Video: Create a video sales letter that puts these “movie scenes” from the cycles into action. Imagine how much easier it will be now to create a video script.

• Product: Create a new product that addresses people in an earlier cycle. For example, if you’re an executive coach and only work with businesses with 10+ employees, you might create an online course for businesses in the cycle of hiring their first 10 employees. Or even in the cycle of hiring their first.

• Positioning: Identify competitors and position yourself against them. In the school supplies example, we could decide to better understand the cycle of looking for sales and deals. Where do the parents check for deals? What websites do they visit? Who do they listen to? If we can better understand what the parents are seeing and reading, we can update our messaging to make sure we’re still their winning choice.

• Marketing: Identify new marketing channels and partners. When you understand each step in the cycle your product participates in, you spot new opportunities for reaching your customer. In the school supply example, we notice that the cycle of returning to school doesn’t just include buying school supplies but also health checks. Which other businesses participate in these health checks? Could we advertise through them? Could we partner with them? Maybe we could host a local event with a family doctor? Try this exercise—new opportunities will leap at you.

You can, of course, use AI to assist with all of those ideas.

Rooting for you,

Billy

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