💡 The Big Idea Behind Why People Buy
Who doesn’t love a neat classification?
There’s nothing handier than having an organized mindset when it comes to planning and managing our lives, our work, and our businesses. It just makes things easier, and lets us follow through with our goals, while keeping everything in check.
Career tracks, retirement planning, saving, investing, budgeting, heck, even your favorite recipes. They all come with their own assortment: variants, steps, indicators, to help you decide the next step, plan and track accordingly.
When it comes to why people buy from you, what are the main drivers that make them decide to spend their money with your business (and not your competitors)?
Can we organize these in a neat way, to follow along?
We sure can!
There are THREE main factors every customer takes into account when buying. Let’s call them tiers.
Any highly successful business ticks all three tiers. It ticks them with thick, permanent, green markers.
If you find one great business that fails at one of them, let me know.
1️⃣ Features/Benefits
That’s pretty basic and boring knowledge.
Which makes many business owners neglect it, until it’s too late.
Anyone who buys your products or services has specific needs your offering should satisfy. Features and benefits are often overlooked — until it’s too late.
This includes the features and benefits of your products, which may be simply rationalized as:
📦 Core features: The main value satisfied: chips -> hunger, laptop -> productivity, headphones -> listening to music.
🚀 Secondary features: Additional value people may derive from your products and services: food -> nutritional value, laptop -> entertainment, headphones -> reducing background noise.
🙌 Benefits: think warranty, customer support, delivery, price/value, accessibility, and many others.
2️⃣ Feelings/Experience
This has been in the entrepreneur’s playbook for at least 100 years.
Since a lot of businesses miss it, it’s still talked about like it’s the new “trend.”
ICYMI, all successful businesses focus on the way their customers feel about what they buy. Sensory experiences are sometimes the main driver and the main differentiator that make or break a business.
Companies spend lots of money and resources on improving & analyzing touch (think laptops), smell (Nike shops, anyone?), hearing (background music), look (Coca-Cola bottle’s shape & color), experience (from luxury hotels to old country B&Bs), or emotions (Gillette, the best a man can get).
3️⃣ Brand: Building Loyalty and Tribe
This third and final tier can be somewhat separated from the others, though it can be found mingled with the other two.
Each company tries to set itself apart using branding and designing a clever brand identity, that shall live in consumers’ mind and drive their choices.
Branding is what makes your customers belong to your “tribe” when they buy and consume what you’re selling.
There’s tons of pages written on this, but remember this: the brand is how people feel about your overall business, embedded in words such as trust, responsibility, honesty, genuineness, originality, values, mission, image, story, promise, culture, innovation.
❗ Keep in mind…
While not everything consumer-related might fit precisely into one specific tier, I hardly find any reason why someone should buy from you that doesn’t fit into one of the three tiers.
Plus, for any two comparable businesses, some features may fit differently.
Take the all too-discussed Zappos shoe company, which raised customer service from a normal benefit to a core feature and a brand asset.
Or think Oreo’s Trust the Twist. Is it a mild benefit of choosing Oreos (to act as a “dice”), an emotional feeling (playfulness), or a piece of brand equity? The answer is that it depends from which point of view a consumer see it.
In other words…
Each and every customer is unique and values each one of the three main tiers differently at each point in time and space.
It’s up to the people behind the business to see what clicks and create value and customer wins.
✅ Now, apply it
Your business already ticks, in one or more ways, all the three tiers.
But, take your time and think about them. If there’s one of the three you have to choose, what would your weaker one be? And what could you do to improve it or add to it?
Likewise, what’s your top strength and what could you do to keep it? How does your competition fare?
Do this periodically to keep your business in check and find the next area of upgrade.
