I Hope You Got Mail

 You all know the drill by now. 

I'm an intern at Align Athlete and this blog post will cover the events of last week! However, I'm struggling to find something to report. The most interesting thing we did last week was on Monday. As I mentioned in last week's post, we had the privilege to work with a Marketing Professor from Grand Valley University. The other interns and I had come up with Customer Profiles for this meeting based on the very limited information that we had on our consumer-base. This included archetypes such as the Athlete, the Overworked Parent, and the Health Professional. Each one was crafted to the best of our ability with comments that were left on a survey Mark made a while back when making the Glute Activator Kickstarter. We presented them and got mixed feedback. On one hand, the professor congratulated us on the effort we went through and told us that our profiles looked really solid. On the other hand, she told us that we had missed the most important points. Specifically, she wanted us to focus in on the Pain Points (grievances that the buyer wants to resolve) and Buying Motivation (reasons why the buyer would want to buy our product). She said that we messed up either one of two things: we weren't specific enough on what they pain points were or we didn't give good reasons as to why our product would be their go-to in the context we put the profiles in. We had constructed these profiles like we were making a character. Each profile had a profession, age, place of work, etc. She said that even within those confines, we had misunderstood what a person would logically do, which made sense. We were working off of a few scant lines from a throwaway survey and a lot of conjecture. We wouldn't understand how an old man would think because we weren't old men.

After ending the call, Mark and the rest of us decided on a new plan of action. We would try and get in contact with people who bought the Glute Activator and see if they would answer a few questions to help us get a better idea of who exactly we were talking to. Mark insisted on doing phone calls, however. While the rest of us didn't agree with that, we pressed forward and wrote up an email to send to... all... 600+ buyers...

You see, we couldn't send it as a mass email because then it would be registered as spam. This is why last week wasn't all that interesting. Tuesday and Thursday was filled with sending a lot of emails. Now, I understand that this could have easily been automated. When I came home, my father showed me how it could be done using functions in Excel. It was a blunder on our part for sure, but at least we now know how to do it in the future. 

That aside, after sending the emails, we waited for someone to schedule a call with one of us interns. We had created a Google Calendar link for people to register to call one of us at certain times. We didn't expect any replies but Kiara quickly got multiple requests. In fact, she received all of them. Putting aside the fact that we know that our largest demographic is men between the ages of 30 and 50, it really solidified our theory that Kiara is simply the most liked intern by our buyers. We had a hunch considering that any Instagram/Facebook reel she was in did better but this was probably the weirdest form of confirmation we could have gotten.

That should do it for last week's events. The plan for this week is to take the calls and hopefully create a more complete customer profile. I'll let you know how that goes next Monday, so I hope you'll check it out. Until then, thanks for making it this far and I'll see you in the next one!