Help Customers Help Themselves
Ask not what your product can do for users; ask instead what users can do with your product.
Consumption is driven by much more than impulse.
People put a lot of thought into the things they buy, and much of the reasoning that drives the purchasing decisions we make isn’t always obvious. Yet when it comes to marketing a product, most companies keep the spotlight exclusively on the functions and features. That’s natural; of course you want to inform prospective buyers of exactly what the thing you’re selling does. But sticking strictly to the technical specs is a missed opportunity to connect more deeply with customers.
Features and functionality make up just one part of why someone buys a product. Often they’re not even the biggest consideration. The best marketing touches on something deeper, dips into the psychology of the consumer. Not in a way that manipulates or exploits, but that empowers. People don’t just want to buy a product because of what it does; they want to buy it because of the way it makes them feel.
I graduated with a business degree, but I’ve always been equally interested in psychology — particularly, human psychology, and why we do the things we do. Why do we react a certain way in a given situation? How do we develop our preferences and biases? What drives people to make the choices and take the actions that they do?
I’ve always been an avid reader. In school, I begged and borrowed psychology books and texts from friends that I’d devour in the spare time between my business courses. Psychology obviously has broad applications across nearly every aspect of life, and that extra-curricular interest has come in handy in many ways since.
One of the concepts I found most fascinating was the idea of self-actualization, laid out by Carl Rogers, a 20th-century humanistic psychologist. Every person has a set of goals and desires in life. When they achieve those goals, Rogers says, they attain self-actualization and realize their peak potential.
Our behaviour, Rogers maintains, is driven by how we perceive ourselves and our situation. Nobody else can truly know how we perceive the world, so nobody else can make the best decisions for us when it comes to achieving our goals. Through self-actualization, we reach, in his words, the highest possible state of “human beingness.”
Sounds great. How do we make that happen?
It’s simple, but not easy. We need to make our ideal self (who we’d like to be) match our real self (how we actually perceive ourselves). Picture a Venn diagram. The left circle is the Perceived Self, the right the Ideal Self. We naturally want to push these two circles together until, in the best case scenario, they become one.
So what does self-actualization have to do with marketing your product?
Well, one of the areas where the ideal self is particularly evident is in the way we buy. More often than not we buy products that align with our idealized self. People make these choices based on the perception of the type of person they’d like to be, and whether this product will help them get there. If I’m a design-conscious consumer with an anti-establishment streak, for instance, I’ll probably gravitate more towards Apple than Microsoft.
These personal preferences don’t just dictate the choices we make as individuals, but as professionals as well. People carry the vision of their idealized self with them into every place and situation they go, including the office. Just as they influence what we do at home and out in the world, our vision of who we want to be factors heavily into which tools and products we select to do our jobs. For example, if I’m a modern, forward-thinking developer, I want something that will allow me to work seamlessly, that strips distractions and enables me to focus, dive deep, and become the developer I want to be. In that case, I’m more likely to gravitate towards a tool like GitHub over ones like BitBucket.
At ZenHub we’ve learned a lot of things over the past three years working with enterprise teams. One of our most valuable observations is that the way organizations choose their tools is increasingly shifting from a top-down approach to a more egalitarian bottom-up method. This new philosophy dovetails beautifully with the idea of self-actualization.
In the past, a small group of senior managers drove decisions around which new tools and products their companies would adopt. These choices were then implemented by their subordinates, whether or not they agreed. Today, more and more companies look to their employees to make decisions around which new tools are best. Instead of dictating what they’ll use, they empower employees to select the tools that most appeal to them — after all, they’ll be the ones using them day in, day out. Those employees will naturally choose the products and tools that make them feel the most confident and competent.
This is where the art of marketing comes in.
Not sensationalist campaigns that play on people’s worst tendencies and insecurities, but thoughtful, considered marketing that enables consumers to step into their best selves. It’s “why” instead of “what.” Or, as elegantly said by Basecamp founder Jason Fried, it’s the difference between “this is what our product can do” and “this is what you can do with our product.”
So when it comes time to market your product, try thinking not just about the nuts and bolts of what it does. Also consider the intangibles. How does someone feel when they’re using it? Does it enable them to work quickly and fluidly? Does it get out of the way, make it easy for the user to accomplish their tasks?
Above all, communicate how your product will enable your customer to become the best version of themselves.
Written by Aaron Upright
Edited by Grady Mitchell
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