Creative Links: Understanding the Customer Behind the Purchase
- Date
- 20 Oct 2026 · 6:00PM - 8:00PM
- Price
- Pay what you can: £7 or £10
- Venue
- Online (via Zoom), UK time
- Programme type
- Talks
Who is your customer really and why do they buy from you? How and why is it useful to develop and define customer personas? Many creative businesses try to appeal to everyone, but the strongest brands and makers develop their profile around a clear understanding of a specific customer, their motivations, behaviours, aspirations and purchasing triggers. This practical and commercially focused presentation will help designer-makers and creative founders define and refine their ideal customer personas to make stronger decisions around product development, pricing, branding, storytelling and marketing.
Led by Business Coach and former board-level luxury brand director Elizabeth Galton, the session will present real-world retail and brand strategy experience with actionable tools that creative businesses can immediately apply to their own brands.
The session will cover:
- What an ideal customer persona actually is and why it matters
- How customer personas influence product, pricing and brand positioning
- Understanding customer motivations, behaviours, values and triggers
- Identifying high-value and repeat-purchase customers
- How to connect customer insight to brand storytelling and conversion
- Audience segmentation and defining multiple customer types
- Practical exercises to help participants build 3-5 customer personas
- Research techniques, including incentivising, interviews, analytics and customer feedback
- Common mistakes founders make when defining their audience
- Translating customer insight into stronger brand and business decisions
You should leave the session with a clearer understanding of who you are making for, a practical framework for building customer personas, greater clarity around customer motivations and purchasing behaviour, tools to refine messaging, visual identity and product positioning and actionable insight to support marketing, sales and future growth
At the beginning of the event, there will be the opportunity to network and talk to peers, and at the conclusion of the presentation, Elizabeth will be pleased to answer your questions.
FAQs:
The Goldsmiths’ Centre’s monthly Creative Links talks and networking events, designed for emerging makers and creative start-ups, provoke thoughts and questions which will enable you to reflect on where you are and how to get to where you want to be. Build your network, create links, learn to grow your business and become part of the community.
Details of our upcoming events and topics covered are listed in our What’s On. Every other month the event will be hosted online, should you not be able to attend an in-person event.
Our Creative Links series aims to link emerging makers with each other, whilst exploring key topics essential to nurturing business success. We run our events in person at the Goldsmiths’ Centre and across the UK with a range of partners, and every other month our events take place online, so that as many of our community as possible can exchange ideas, learn from industry experts, and form valuable connections.
We do not record or broadcast our events to encourage the open sharing of ideas and experiences. Popular topics will be repeated over time, so online and in-person participations can both engage in them.
We are committed to making our training programmes and events as inclusive and accessible as possible. If you have any access requirements, please inform us as early as possible and we will do our utmost to so we can make the reasonable adjustments. While we will do our best to accommodate your needs, advance notice is essential to ensure we can provide appropriate support.
To discuss your requirements when booking tickets for our Goldsmiths’ Centre training programmes, please contact us at boxoffice@goldsmiths-centre.org
Who is the speaker?
Elizabeth Galton is an accredited business coach, trained jeweller and former marketing and creative director with over 20 years’ experience in the jewellery industry. A graduate of the Royal College of Art, she began her career as a designer-maker, founding her own jewellery brand, which then secured investment on BBC’s Dragon’s Den and received consecutive nominations for UK Jewellery Designer of the Year. Her brand went on to retail internationally, partnering with organisations including QVC, Swarovski and Mercedes-Benz, with features in Vogue, Financial Times, HTSI, Elle and Harper’s Bazaar.
She understands first-hand the realities of building a jewellery business from pricing and production to confidence, positioning and growth. Elizabeth went on to work for some of the UK’s best-known jewellery brands, as Creative Director at Links of London and Mappin & Webb, leading their product portfolios and campaigns, and later as Marketing Director at Signet Jewellers, the world’s largest diamond jewellery retailer. Today, Elizabeth combines her commercial and creative experience to support jeweller-makers and entrepreneurs to build sustainable, confident businesses, with a particular focus on pricing, positioning and brand-led growth.