“The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it’s selling.” ~Peter Drucker
What are you buying? Think about the last big purchase you made, was it a house, car, bag of donuts? Big purchase doesn’t really have to be expensive. Divert your attention to donuts for a second…
Yummmmmm
OK back to the reason we’re thinking of donuts, if you are buying donuts for your morning breakfast in your car, the sleeve of donuts is fine. What if you are bringing donuts to that morning meeting… you might be able to bring a box of pre-packaged donuts from the grocery store. But what if it’s a birthday donut for your friend? How about if you’re having an open house event for prospective customers… then what donuts do you offer?
The donuts you select have a lot to do with the emotion of the outcome you desire.
EMOTION
When you buy donuts you rarely select this product based on the the ingredients. You don’t really care how it was made. You care how this product will reflect on YOU.
It sounds silly, but I had this stressful job about 2 months ago. We hosted a major event at 9:00am at our marina and we wanted to provide donuts to our customers, for free!
I debated the type of emotion/image I was trying to evoke based on a donut! Seriously… I was stressed out about this weighing the cost vs. the quality. It’s true, embarrassing as it is to admit, this was a big deal.
Why am I telling you my story? Because when I purchased the winning donuts I’m guessing that the baker never thought about my internal struggle. It’s easy to think about this emotional struggle based on a wedding cake, but donuts? Nope. That’s just strange.
Well, your customers are often times not buying the product you are selling. Sure they may actually walk out of the store with the product you are selling, but you may be on very different pages.
The baker sold me 200 donuts in a box, I bought 200 moments of social interaction with a donut as a catalyst. I was purchasing something to create a memory.
When you start to think about what your product means to your customer… the WHY of why they are buying your product, you will be one step closer to skyrocketing your sales.
You’ll still need to sell the features of your product, but make sure to sell the emotion of your product.
SME + Content/Consistency + Goals/Motivation + Customers = Infinity Marketing Machine
PS: Make sure to “like” this post… and follow me! (and please do me a favor… if you want more great ideas like the one in this post, just fill out this form and I’ll send them to you… start here)
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Action Steps
1- Find the emotion of your product – one way to do this is to “switch places with your customer” and pretend you’re the customer, discover the reason why you are buying the product… write down that answer and start talking about the emotion in your posts!
2- Install my free app! (SmallBusinessClubApp.com)
Podcast:
Listen to Episode #203 of the Two Minute Commute audio blog Podcast
