The beauty of building a Direct-to-Consumer Brand is the direct access you get to your customers. You have their phone numbers, their addresses, their gender, and in some cases even their Date of Birth. This enable you to draw out a customer persona very early on in the business.

With this, you can crisply define your communication & creative strategy and the audiences you want to target.

However, there is one more step that you need to take to truly crystallise this customer persona. Pick up the phone and get on call with your customers.

I see one too many founders & brand managers missing this step. Here is a step-by-step breakdown of how you can lead with this –

1. List down you research objective or problem statement

You could be making consumer calls to generally gather feedback about your customer’s experience with your brand, or trying to solve a specific problem at hand (maybe a product is receiving negative feedback and you need to delve deeper), or trying to better understand behaviour associated with the category (maybe you have a new launch upcoming).

In either case, you need to clearly define the objective for this consumer research activity.

2. Pick a random sample of atleast 30 customers

In order for your research to be truly objective, you want to pick a random sample from a cohort. For instance, let’s say we are trying to determine the reasons for repeat purchases of high-value customers.

Then the cohort in this research study is ‘high-value customers’. You need to pick a random sample of at least 30 customers from this cohort. Post a sample size of 30 customers, the rules of normal distribution begin to apply and we can begin to draw conclusions. The more calls you can make, the better the results!

3. Build a questionnaire

Write down all the questions that seem relevant in context of the research objective you have defined above. You can categorise questions in two buckets – general questions which relate to the overall brand experience, and specific questions which relate to the specific question you are trying to answer.

Try to keep the questions as open-ended as possible. For instance, when asking about a product experience –

Ask ‘How would you define your experience of using the product?’ vs. ‘Did you have a good experience using the product?’

The first question is open-ended, vs. the second question which creates a bias towards the adjective ‘good’. Once you have created the questionnaire, check each question to ensure that it is neutral and open-ended and not biased.

You can also pose some questions in third-person. For instance, ‘If your friend were to use this floor cleaning agent, what would she have disliked most about it’?

This puts the candidate at ease and they are able to answer without trying to build or maintain a persona in front of the interviewee.

Once you have all the questions, sequence them in a way that they flow like a conversation vs. being a question & answer round.

4. Park 4-5 hours for these calls

In my experience it is best to simply pick up the phone and call. Pick the time-slot depending on the demography of your cohort. If you are calling middle-aged housewives, then the daytime might be most effective. If you are calling young professionals, then later in the evening or weekends might serve better.

In my early days, I would schedule google calls with customers, but the drop-out rates were massive. Turns out that simply making the call and requesting a few minutes of their time is more effective, and in most cases people are kind enough to engage.

Pro Tip: Introduce yourself well and share that you are calling from the marketing team of so & so brand. You can also loop them into the objective of this call. This makes them feel important and respected.

5. Allow the conversation to flow

Remember that the questionnaire is meant to act only as a guide. Start with your first question and be attentive to what the customer is sharing. Ask questions in response to their feedback. This will make them feel heard.

This phone-call needs to be a conversation where you are deeply listening to the consumer’s feedback and responding to it as well.

Lead them to the next question seamlessly as the conversation flows. If you are heading in a starkly different direction, go with it. Remember, the intention of these calls is to gather genuine customer feedback and not always stick to a script.

6. Collect the data

One person in the room should be responsible for writing down all the feedback by being received. Ideally, use an excel or google sheet, with all the questions marked out in Column A. Each of the next column will contain feedback of the individual customers by question.

Keep the last row marked as ‘Miscellaneous’ – this contains feedback that does not belong to any other section.

7. Analyse the data

And finally analyse the data. First, identify broad patterns that emerge from these conversations. Then drill deeper into each question to identify patterns that emerge for each questions/section.

In case of ‘yes & no’ questions, use pie charts to clearly determine patterns. In case of open-ended questions, identify feedback that recurs.

If there is some feedback that is starkly different from the rest, park this for further validation.

And in case of broad patterns that emerge, these will flow into the brand decisions that need to be made.

Pro Tip: You can also input all this research data into ChatGPT and prompt it to analyse patterns that emerge. This will throw back some interesting results :)

In conclusion, this is a process that you need to do once every 6 months in order to catch the pulse of your customer. It could be in order to answer a specific question or just to understand how your customers feel about the brand.

You will be amazed at how a simple activity like this can have a gargantuan impact on the future your brand.