Don't Find Your Ideal Customer, Build Them.

This is the second of three posts about how companies create better customer relationships. Last week, I wrote about organizing marketing around customer outcomes rather than product features. This week, I want to go one level deeper: not simply what outcome a customer wants, but what kind of customer the relationship itself can produce.

Marketers spend a lot of time defining the Ideal Customer Profile.

How old are your best customers? What do they earn? What do they believe? What do they buy? What media do they consume? What else can we observe about them that will help us find more people who look the same?

There is nothing inherently wrong with this. If you know your best customers are 40-year-old runners with high disposable incomes who buy premium nutrition products, it would be weird not to use that information.

But the exercise contains an assumption that deserves more scrutiny: that your ideal customer already exists, fully formed, somewhere in the market waiting to be acquired.

Often, that is not what happened to your best customers at all.

They became better customers through their relationship with you.

They learned. Their habits changed. They became more confident. They got better at using the product. They understood the category more clearly. Their needs became more sophisticated. Some began buying more frequently, recommending the company to other people or providing the sort of feedback that actually improves the business.

In other words, the relationship changed them.

That suggests a different question:

Who could become our ideal customer, and how can we guide them there?

The customer most likely to buy today may not be your best customer tomorrow

Consider two people shopping for skincare.

The first has spent years learning about the category. She understands retinoids, acids, barrier health, sunscreen, concentrations and competing formulations. She reads the ingredient list, compares your product with four others and decides yours is currently the best.

Fantastic. You have acquired a sophisticated customer.

But her sophistication existed before she met you. The relationship begins with a comparison: Are you the best option available to me?

If the answer remains yes for long enough, the relationship can become extremely durable. Trust accumulates. Habits form. History matters. But the company begins the relationship competing against an already-developed standard.

Now consider another customer.

She cares about her skin but knows relatively little about skincare. She is curious, willing to improve and perhaps slightly overwhelmed by an industry in which apparently everyone on TikTok has a different opinion about whether she should be exfoliating her face with an acid.

She starts with a simple routine.

Over time, the brand helps her understand how to go from good to glowing: why sunscreen matters, how active ingredients work, why consistency matters, what irritation means, when to add something new and how her needs change over time.

A few years later, she may be just as sophisticated as the first customer.

But there is an important difference.

Part of her sophistication was developed inside the relationship with the brand.

She did not merely buy skincare from the company. She became a better skincare customer while she was there.

That can have important commercial consequences. She may use products more consistently, buy across more of the range, need less basic support, provide better feedback, explain the products intelligently to friends and recommend the brand with considerably more credibility than someone forwarding a discount code.

She has become invested in the relationship.

Your ideal customer is a business outcome

This suggests a different way of thinking about the Ideal Customer Profile.

Instead of describing only the person you want to acquire, describe the customer you want a good relationship to produce.

Perhaps your mature customer understands how to get value from what you sell. They use it consistently. They make increasingly informed decisions. They require less basic assistance. They trust the company, give useful feedback, recommend it credibly and occasionally introduce other people to it.

That is quite different from:

"Our ideal customer is a 42-year-old woman earning $120,000 who listens to Huberman."

One describes someone you hope exists.

The other describes something your company can actually help create.

This distinction matters because a customer's propensity to purchase in a category is not the same thing as their ability to become a valuable lifetime customer.

Those two things are correlated sometimes. They are not the same.

The person most likely to buy today may already have established preferences, sophisticated expectations and twenty competing brands in her consideration set.

Meanwhile, someone with less category expertise may have more room to develop knowledge, habits and trust through the relationship.

This does not mean an inexperienced customer is automatically better. That would be silly. It means acquisition intent and developmental potential are different variables, and most marketing systems are considerably better at identifying the first.

Better customers are economically useful

There is nothing charitable about this argument.

A customer who understands the product better will use it more consistently. A customer who gets more value from it will purchase more frequently. A customer who trusts the company will remain longer. A customer who understands the category will make more appropriate purchases and recommend the company more credibly.

Those behaviors affect retention, purchase frequency, lifetime value, referral volume, word of mouth, support costs, acquisition efficiency and brand credibility.

The economic thesis is simple:

Customers can become more valuable to a business because the relationship has made the business more valuable to them.

This is different from merely optimizing customers for higher spend.

The development has to run both ways. If a company encourages greater consumption without increasing the customer's ability to derive value from it, that is not customer development. It is just better merchandising. (More on that next week when we talk about the value exchange.)

There is another consequence: better customers are harder to fool

There is a slightly uncomfortable implication to all of this.

If you deliberately make customers more capable, they become more capable of evaluating you too.

A skincare company that helps customers understand ingredients will eventually have customers who can read its ingredient lists.

A financial company that develops financially literate customers will eventually have customers who can recognize an expensive or mediocre financial product.

A running company that genuinely develops runners will eventually serve customers sophisticated enough to tell whether its shoes, advice and technology are actually helping them improve.

This is good.

Companies often worry that educating customers makes it easier for them to leave. It does.

It also creates an internal discipline that is easy to underestimate.

The team responsible for developing customers has to understand the product, the category, competing alternatives and the questions increasingly sophisticated customers are asking. If customers are developing faster than the company, that team will know fairly quickly.

The company therefore has to keep earning the relationship.

Or, put more simply:

The more capable you make your customers, the more capable your company has to become to keep them.

That is not a flaw in the model. It may be one of its more useful properties.

A business that depends on customer ignorance can be disrupted the moment someone gives those customers better information.

A business that deliberately develops sophisticated customers is forced to develop alongside them. Unless you're in the commodities business, this is what you signed up for. Own it.

The brand you want to become is unlocked by developing the customers you want to have

Now zoom out.

Imagine developing hundreds or thousands of customers who understand your products, use them effectively, stay longer, provide useful feedback, refer other people and speak intelligently about the company.

The effect does not stop at customer economics.

Those customers begin to shape the brand.

They determine what other people hear about it. Their questions influence product development. Their behavior creates social proof. Their recommendations acquire new customers. Their standards force the business to improve.

The customer base itself becomes part of the company's capability.

Which leads to the larger idea:

The brand you want to become is unlocked by developing the customers you want to have.

We normally treat brand building as something a company does to a market. It develops a proposition, designs an identity, buys media and tries to establish a position in people's minds.

But brands are also produced through the customers who participate in them.

The company develops the customer. The customer, through their behavior, helps develop the brand.

Try this with your own business

Take 20 minutes and describe the customer you would like to have three years from now.

Do not begin with demographics.

Ask what that customer knows, what they can do, how their habits have changed, how they use your products differently, what they no longer need help with and how they talk about the company to other people.

Then ask why that customer is economically more valuable.

Do they purchase more frequently? Stay longer? Use more of the range? Refer other customers? Provide better information? Advocate for the brand? Add credibility to the category?

Finally, compare that customer with someone placing their first order today.

What changed?

What did they learn? What habits formed? What confidence developed? What can they now do that they could not do at the beginning of the relationship?

And then ask the question that matters:

What did our business do to cause any of that to happen?

This is where customer development stops being a nice idea and becomes a strategic problem.

If your ideal customer is partly an outcome of the relationship, then you should be able to explain how the relationship produces them.

If you cannot, you may still have excellent customers.

You may just be relying on the market to build them for you.