Back in May, we sent out a customer survey to our newsletter subscribers again. The result was like throwing bread to a flock of ducks. We have no idea why or how, but nearly 2,000 people answered a ridiculously long form full of all sorts of stupid questions. As a sample size, that’s already big enough that you could probably use it to predict the next president.
Like every other company on Earth, we’re interested in what’s going on inside our customers’ heads. Naturally, this is because we want more money, and the only honest way to get more money is to serve customers better and put better products on the market. With the extra cash, we can buy big gold watches, fast cars, and build a Death Star. Everybody wins.
A broad survey also gives you all kinds of interesting statistics you can shuffle around just for the joy of shuffling them around. We looked at the results, spun them around in Excel, and even sicced ChatGPT on them. Below is all the information fit for publication. The rest we printed on receipt paper, put inside a pentagram made of candles, and used in a mysterious Cthulhu summoning ritual.
Valco customers
The international spread of respondents was exactly what our own mental image and stats about Valco’s customer base would suggest. About 68% of customers are from Finland, 25% from Germany, and the rest scattered around Europe like sardines in the open sea. A couple percent of respondents were from somewhere outside the EU.
More interesting, though, is what kind of people our customers are. Even though just today on LinkedIn I saw someone say Valco is a cheap and crappy Varusteleka knockoff, the truth is we’ve done this whole thing our own way without overthinking it too much.
The end result seems to be that our customers also look a lot like us entrepreneurs. In other words, original, unique, and absolutely brilliant individuals.
We asked what kind of environment our customers live in, and while the distribution was fairly even as such, it still differs a bit from where people statistically tend to live. You’re more likely to find a Valco customer in some small town than in a big metropolis. Probably because in a small town it’s more important to make the neighbors jealous with your new headphones.
While everyone else seems to be chasing Instagram selfie kids, our customers are a more mature crowd. The share of men is still overrepresented (80%), but compared to last year the share of female customers has increased nicely. We’re trying not to be just some dude brand. We’ll gladly take women’s money too, and everyone else’s regardless of gender.
Statistically speaking, the average Valco customer is a man around fifty who lives in Finland, in Oulu or Tampere. In Germany, somewhere around Leipzig or Dortmund. We didn’t ask, but they probably like metal music, beer, and sausages. Of course, in absolute numbers the place with the most customers is always going to depend on how big the place is. If you look at the German federal states, our customers there are spread pretty evenly across the country.
That said, we do have to admit the age distribution of the customer base is impressively even, but you couldn’t turn this into a trendy youth brand even with some very creative use of imagination. Which is good, because young people don’t have any money anyway. My own kid, who’s almost twenty, is constantly short of cash too.
Customer preferences
We also asked about how customers use their headphones and what they prefer. Perhaps not too surprisingly, most customers (94%) use their headphones primarily for listening to music. For Valco customers, sound quality is by far the most important reason to choose headphones. Which is also why you’re Valco customers.
Noise cancelling is also an important feature in headphones. One of the most popular use cases seems to be using noise cancelling to filter out some of the noise from the outside world.
When nearly 20% of customers say they use their headphones to watch weird and slightly embarrassing porn, we probably need to come up with some kind of quick button for future models that hides the porn and brings up, say, an Excel spreadsheet instead. This might increase demand for the headphones in office use.
Feedback
Right at the start, we have to admit that the feedback has gotten worse compared to the 2022 survey. So at least we haven’t gone in a better direction.
That said, there’s still no need to head to Bauhaus to buy rope just yet. The website is at four stars and overall satisfaction with the company, on a scale of 1 to 10, is 9.35. We can also calculate NPS, meaning Net Promoter Score, from the responses, and it comes out at 80. Plenty of companies would do anything to see numbers like that, but we’re a bit like Käärijä not winning Eurovision: disappointed as hell, because we know we were better.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can now say that stretched delivery times have definitely wiped the smiles off customers’ faces and dragged down our performance. Customers have also made it very clear that there’s room for improvement in the functionality of the online store and in customer service.
Luckily there’s light at the end of the tunnel: the delivery problems have at least been solved for now, and we have more VMK25 headphones in stock than Lidl has sausages. From here on, our goal is that products are available exactly when we say they will be.
The feedback on the online store has been taken seriously, and a full overhaul of the webshop is already underway. Our aim is to have an easier-to-browse, better-looking, better-functioning, and above all sexier store ready during the summer.
Lots of ideas
Henry Ford once said that if he had asked customers what they wanted, the answer would have been “faster horses.” Or at least somebody put those words in Henry’s mouth. Companies often like to think customers don’t know what they want. Or they come up with some 'revolutionary' thing and then market it so hard that everyone simply has to have one.
This time we decided to do it differently and ask you directly what you want. We got a lot of excellent ideas for improving our marketing. Sure, a large chunk of the ideas were a bit... let’s say still under development. But all in all, we got excellent feedback for the price.
What we especially appreciate, though, is the feedback on improving the product range. We got over 1,000 responses on how current products could be improved, plus lots of product ideas. As an interesting detail, almost all the product ideas were things we had already considered before, but now we know a lot better what people actually want.
We’ve already started reorganizing our product development to better match your needs, and we’ve moved the products with clearly existing demand to the front of the queue.
We’re going to take this even further, and in the future we’ll also ask customers for their opinion on product appearance, and where possible, on features too. For example, we currently have so-called hi-fi headphones in the works. They’re still on the drawing board, so we can absolutely put different concepts in front of customers for evaluation and comments. Worth keeping an eye on the Valco newsletter.
