Businesses spend enormous amounts of time explaining what their products and services do.
Customers are usually thinking about something else entirely.
They are thinking about what changes for them if they buy.
A recent discussion about consumer behaviour, brand building and purchasing decisions made this distinction particularly well. The same product can be bought for utility, identity, status, belonging, design, reassurance, generosity or dozens of other reasons. The product remains unchanged. The reason for choosing it changes with the customer.
Understanding those reasons is one of the foundations of effective marketing.
It affects brand positioning, website design, content, advertising, search strategy, customer journeys, offers and ultimately conversion.
Customers buy outcomes before they buy products
Most businesses naturally describe what they make.
A manufacturer talks about specifications.
A software company talks about features.
A consultancy talks about services.
An ecommerce brand talks about materials, design and functionality.
The customer translates all of this into a much simpler question:
What will this do for me?
David Ogilvy made essentially the same observation decades ago. Effective advertising promises the customer something they value. It might be better performance, greater convenience, improved appearance, relief from a problem, social status or better value. The media have changed dramatically since Ogilvy wrote about advertising. Human motivations have changed considerably less.
A technically superior product therefore does not automatically produce technically focused customers.
People can buy because they want to:
- Solve a practical problem
- Save time
- Reduce risk
- Feel more organised
- Feel more confident
- Look successful
- Demonstrate taste
- Belong to a particular group
- Reward themselves
- Give somebody a good gift
- Avoid losing something they already value
- Move towards a better version of themselves
The strongest buying motivation can also change by audience, occasion and stage of the customer journey.
One product can have several completely different markets
The Ridge wallet example from the discussion demonstrates the point particularly clearly.
The company originally had a strongly functional proposition. Customers could buy a slimmer wallet because they wanted something smaller, stronger and more practical.
The same underlying product subsequently appealed to other customers because of its designs and another substantial group bought it because it worked as a gift.
There are effectively several propositions sitting inside one product.
One customer sees:
A better wallet.
Another sees:
Something which reflects my style.
Another sees:
A gift somebody will actually want.
Businesses frequently miss this because founders understandably see the product through the reason it was created.
The founder’s motivation is useful evidence. It is not automatically the largest market.
Finding additional buying motivations can create entirely new audiences without changing the core product.
Emotional decisions still need rational justification
Purchasing decisions are often described as rational processes.
They rarely begin there.
People can feel that something is right for them before they have assembled the reasons to justify buying it.
Identity plays a major role.
A design speaks to them.
People they respect use it.
It reflects how they see themselves.
It signals something about them.
It removes a worry.
It feels safer.
It feels easier.
It feels like progress.
The rational explanation often arrives afterwards.
This does not make evidence, specifications, pricing or proof irrelevant. It gives those elements a different role.
Emotion can create desire.
Evidence helps somebody become comfortable acting on it.
Good marketing needs both.
The buying journey starts before somebody reaches your website
One of the more useful ideas in the discussion concerns where the customer journey actually begins.
It usually begins before a customer encounters the company.
Something happens in their world.
A problem develops.
A market changes.
Their existing supplier disappoints them.
Their company grows.
Technology moves forward.
A competitor improves.
A new regulation appears.
A new behaviour becomes normal.
An old solution becomes inconvenient.
Awareness starts forming before the first Google search, advert, recommendation or website visit.
This creates an important distinction between capturing demand and creating demand.
Existing demand makes growth considerably easier
Imagine a market where thousands of people already know they have a particular problem.
They understand that solutions exist.
They are researching those solutions.
They may already be comparing suppliers.
A business entering this market still needs a good proposition, brand and customer experience but much of the education has already happened.
The alternative is category creation.
The business must first convince people that a problem deserves attention, explain a new type of solution and then persuade them to buy its particular version.
The discussion uses the example of launching a completely new home composting category. Considerable investment was required simply to create enough awareness for customers to understand why the product should exist. Entering a market where demand is already increasing removes part of that burden.
Category creation can produce enormous businesses when it works.
It also requires substantially more education, attention and capital.
For most businesses there is considerable commercial value in understanding where demand already exists before deciding what to promote.
Search behaviour is part of market research
Search data becomes particularly useful here.
People searching for a problem, category or solution are leaving evidence of demand.
The volume alone does not tell you whether those people are commercially useful customers. It can reveal where awareness already exists and the language people use to describe what they want.
This is one reason WLW FUTURE starts with research before production.
For a new website, campaign, content programme or proposition, the important questions come before the creative work:
- What problems are customers already trying to solve
- Which audiences experience those problems
- How do those audiences describe them
- What alternatives are they already considering
- Which competitors currently capture that demand
- What creates dissatisfaction or urgency
- Which buying motivations are practical
- Which are emotional
- What evidence does the customer need before acting
- Where does the organisation need to appear during the journey
WLW’s wider content and commercial strategy follows the same principle: build around the problems customers are trying to solve, use demand evidence to choose the language and use relevant proof to earn the enquiry.
Stop treating the customer journey as a website funnel
A customer journey diagram often begins with an advert, Google search or website visit.
Real journeys are messier.
The first meaningful stage might be dissatisfaction six months earlier.
A senior manager notices that leads are falling.
A Marketing Director realises competitors now look substantially stronger online.
A manufacturer discovers its distributors cannot find current technical information.
A leadership team starts discussing a rebrand.
A CRM implementation exposes problems elsewhere in the sales journey.
A company enters a new market.
A website which seemed acceptable last year suddenly becomes a constraint.
These events create receptiveness.
Marketing performs considerably better when it meets an existing commercial reality.
WLW’s own outreach analysis has repeatedly found the same pattern. People are more likely to respond when they recognise a real issue connected to something happening in their organisation, such as a website review, platform redevelopment, CRM change, product launch, customer journey problem, content weakness or growth programme.
The principle applies well beyond outbound marketing.
Relevance starts with the customer’s situation.
Different customers need different reasons to choose you
A useful marketing strategy therefore needs more than a single buyer persona.
It needs an understanding of buying motivations.
Take a website redesign.
The Managing Director may see:
Our company has outgrown the current website.
The Marketing Director may see:
The site is making campaigns harder to convert.
The Sales Director may see:
Prospects cannot understand what we actually sell.
The Operations Director may see:
Our systems and customer journeys no longer connect properly.
The Finance Director may see:
We keep spending money fixing an old platform.
One project.
Five potentially different reasons for approving it.
Marketing which talks only about modern design misses most of the commercial argument.
Features become useful when connected to consequences
Features still matter.
Their value becomes clearer when the customer can connect them to an outcome.
Instead of:
Integrated CRM
The customer may understand:
Enquiries reach the right person faster and fewer opportunities disappear between marketing and sales.
Instead of:
Improved information architecture
The customer may understand:
Customers can find the right service without navigating the organisation’s internal structure.
Instead of:
Technical SEO
The customer may understand:
Search engines can properly discover and understand the pages capable of generating commercial enquiries.
Instead of:
Brand strategy
The customer may understand:
Customers understand why they should choose you instead of another apparently similar company.
The feature explains the mechanism.
The consequence explains why anybody should care.
Research should change the work
Customer research becomes pointless when it produces a presentation which is politely approved and then forgotten.
It should influence decisions.
At WLW FUTURE, research can feed directly into brand positioning, website architecture, content, search visibility, advertising, CRM, outreach and customer journey design.
The WLW process starts by investigating the current position through analytics, competitor research, audience work, interviews and audits before defining priorities and moving into messaging, content, journeys, design and production.
The commercial reason is straightforward.
Understanding the buyer earlier reduces the risk of producing expensive work based primarily on internal assumptions.
The question to ask before the next campaign
Before producing another website page, advert, email, campaign or piece of content, ask:
Why would somebody care about this now?
Then go deeper.
Why would this particular customer care?
What happened before they arrived?
What do they want to change?
What are they afraid of losing?
What do they hope to gain?
What does choosing this say about them?
What proof will they need?
What other options are they considering?
Where are they already looking?
A business which understands those questions has considerably more to work with than a business which simply knows its product features.
The best marketing does not begin with finding a more persuasive way to describe what the company wants to sell.
It begins by understanding why somebody might want to buy.
WLW FUTURE helps organisations understand the commercial problem first then connect the strategy, brand, website, content, search, marketing and customer journey required to solve it.
