Why Everyone From Estee Lauder to Starbucks Is Racing to ‘Meet the Customer Where They Are’
Why Everyone From Estee Lauder to Starbucks Is Racing to ‘Meet the Customer Where They Are’
Data shows that the strategy is having a bit of a moment, whether you’re talking about pricing or customer acquisition.
A Starbucks Coffee shop in Manhattan. Photo: Getty Images
Once you look for it you’ll see it everywhere. In an update to the Delta frequent flyer program. In a collab between the New York Giants and a jewelry brand. In a Starbucks statement launching a new clotted cream cold brew.
“We’re meeting our customers where they’re at.” It’s a piece of sales and marketing wisdom so obvious as to almost sound redundant, yet which nevertheless seems to have caught hold of the entrepreneurial imagination.
A consultant will say it while extolling the virtues of marketing to older shoppers. A marketing VP will cite it when explaining the importance of consistent messaging. Even the CEO of Estee Lauder was quoted using the phrase when, in a nod to the need to woo customers with appealing prices, he reportedly told analysts: “Our intent…is to meet the consumer where they are.”
It’s hardly a new sentiment, of course. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey cited it over a decade ago while explaining how he developed Square. And it’s had a long life in the world of both medicine and social work as a lens through which to engage with patients or those in need.
But the commerce-oriented version of the phrase seems to be having a bit of a moment. Google Trends data indicates that searches for “meet our customers where they are” saw outsized spikes in early 2023 and late 2024 and now again during this month. Those pops came after more than a decade of fairly flat interest.
“We’ve gone through these phases of marketing,” says Oliver Bogner, founder of the digital marketing company Team Go Ventures, the 43rd fastest-growing small business on the most recent Inc. 5000 list. There was “brand marketing in the era of the soap opera,” he says, and then the industry switched to “performance marketing” where “everything needs an ROI attached to it.”
Now, he says, marketing is in another era: that of “meeting customers where they’re at,” also known as “full-funnel marketing” or, as Bogner likes to call it, “smarketing.” (That is, a frictionless combination of sales and marketing.)
It’s largely a dynamic driven by social media, adds Bogner, who now works as head of social commerce at an agency that recently acquired Team Go: “Social media, you can purchase through, so now it’s not just the brand people saying ‘We’ve got to be on social.’ It’s now the sales people saying ‘We’ve got to be on social,’ and it’s the financial people saying ‘We’ve got to be on social.’”
Jonathan Jadali—founder and CEO of the B2B PR firm Ascend Agency, No. 18 on last year’s Inc. 5000 list—says he’s heard versions of the “meeting customers where they’re at” soundbite coming up “more and more” as of late.
“I don’t know if it’s a trending word that’s been popping off in the past six to 12 months, but I personally work with a couple of PR agencies and marketing agencies based out of L.A. and Dubai, and … they always are phrasing that statement for the client’s behalf,” he tells Inc. “I feel like I’m hearing it every month, if not even every two weeks.”
It’s often used in reference to a need to find some common ground with a client, or even make a concession to them, Jadali adds.
Yet even if this particular phrasing is having a moment, it’s hardly a new business strategy.
“Carrying things your customer expects to find from you is an underlying, elemental retail idea,” says Mark Cohen, the former director of retail studies at Columbia Business School. “Successful retailers, since time immemorial, have tried to align what they have to sell with what they believe their customers need.”
For instance, he adds, a smart entrepreneur doesn’t try to sell snow shovels in Florida or Kansas City Chiefs jerseys in Philly.
“What you have in your store, what you carry on your website and how you market what it is you carry—all of it should be with the customers’ expectations in mind,” Cohen says. “Point your messaging at who and where your customer resides—to the best of your ability—and your messaging is likely to resonate, as opposed to just blasting things out there and assuming something will stick.”
All of this requires good two way communication with your customer base. We typically train our sales team to be great communicators but listening to your customers creates a connection and connections create loyal customers. Challenge your sales team to come up with creative ways to engage your customers in order to go a little deeper to uncover likes, dislikes and day to day challenges they are experiencing.
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BY BRIAN CONTRERAS AND CARL PHILLIPS
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