Aligning On The Right Customer

The challenge

Uneven growth, no shared customer picture

A fast-growing international payments business was seeing uneven results across regions — but it was unclear why.

Part of the answer lay in a tension between how leadership understood the customer and how those closer to the ground experienced them day to day. This disconnect was quietly shaping targets, product direction and messaging — pulling the business in different directions without anyone naming it directly.

The brief had three objectives: build a shared, evidence-based picture of who the ideal customer is and why they choose the product; understand customer expectations and what would make for a genuinely winning proposition; and identify the right media and messaging approach to reach them more effectively.

The approach

From assumption to evidence

Desk research & data analysis

Review of existing internal data, user testing findings and other discovery work. Combined with analysis of the customer base and relevant macro-economic data to build context before speaking to anyone.

Stakeholder interviews

Mapped existing assumptions and perspectives across the business — surfacing where leadership and ground-level teams diverged, and identifying the specific questions the research needed to resolve.

In-depth customer interviews

40+ interviews with current customers and prospects. Explored decision-making journeys, what value actually meant to different people, product expectations and what a winning proposition would look like.

Segmentation analysis

Identified distinct behavioural and attitudinal clusters within the customer base — going beyond demographics to understand what actually predicted product fit, satisfaction and retention.

Cross-business workshop

Collaborative session with marketing, design, product, commercial and local and global leadership. Built shared ownership of the findings and translated them into agreed priorities across messaging, product and targeting.

The outcome

A shared language for growth

The research produced a data-powered Ideal Customer Profile that unified sales, marketing and product around a common understanding of who they were building for and why.

The ICP identified a previously under-prioritised customer segment that had significantly higher lifetime value and lower churn than the existing focus audience. Shifting towards this segment had tangible effects on acquisition efficiency and retention metrics.

Perhaps as importantly: for the first time, every team was working from the same picture of the customer. The misalignment that had been quietly costing the business was resolved.