Business Is Not A Popularity Contest
Like Leadership, It’s Not All About Calling All The Shots
Business is not being #1, especially to the wrong customers.
It’s not about shouting to everyone, but making your message heard to key audiences.
There’s this false perceptive that you need to create the hottest video in the market, gaining tons of likes & comments and you can call that marketing.
But if people don’t convert people through the video then it’s just a fun engaging project, you’re not marketing...
You need to have a clear incentive for the customer to buy your product.
They need to ‘want’ it. Because…
People don’t buy based on what they need but what they want.
Where Businesses are Born and Slain
“So, how did you come up with the idea for your business?”
For many entrepreneurs, the answer will be plain simple: It started with a problem. A problem that demands a solution but has no product yet in the market.
Soon, they set out to create that product and become business owners.
From the book The Personal MBA, every person on the planet needs to fulfill the 5 Core Human Drives:
1. The Drive to Acquire = obtain or collect physical objects
2. The Drive to Bond = to be loved & feel valued in our relationships with others.
3. The Drive to Learn = desire to satisfy our curiosity
4. The Drive to Defend = desire to protect ourselves
5. The Drive to Feel = desire for emotional experiences like pleasure or excitement.
If there is a human drive that is not met, we hunger for it to be solved. We look for the next product or the next service that will make us feel better.
Right now, we can see Human Drives everywhere — connecting with our friends, inclinations towards a romantic relationship, buying a product to help solve our deepest problems.
It’s all around us, we just need to start looking for it.
And if you are an aspiring entrepreneur, we can start looking for Human Drives to solve with ourselves.
It’s Not About Your Product
I know that I might be contradicting myself here since the previous paragraph focuses on the product. But, if you are running a business and not a charitable organization, it’s not about your product but your customers
It’s not about your product, it’s about your customers
Your product is actually just an object on the shelf. What makes it special is when customers have a desire for it and if it fulfills one of the 5 Core Human Drives.
The lifeblood of your business is sales, and it starts with the customer.
For startups, it’s tempting to add features in your application or software that may be good to you but not what’s best for the customer.
We may want to add a cool feature like Virtual Reality for our business but customers may not be comfortable wearing the VR goggles all the time.
This is why customer feedback is significant especially during a product’s early-stage development. And this brings us to create a customer avatar
Creating Your Customer Avatar
We don’t just find out who your customers are but break down your customer to the very detail: their demographics, age, even their buying preferences
There are 3 main factors in creating a Customer Avatar:
1. Who your ideal customer is
2. Where they’re hanging out online
3. What are their problems
I recently read an article by Caelan Huntress on how to create your customer avatar, so instead of repeating the same content, you can check it out here.
Lastly, name your customer avatar. In the end, You need to be able to identify their general activity, even to the granular detail on how they spend their day so you can integrate your product offering seamlessly to their life
There Is No Fun Being The Center Of Attention
You can see ads on TV, social media, YouTube, and even the billboard across the street. They are everywhere
It’s about some big company — a brand you probably heard thousands of times but don’t plan to buy their product.
They have done a good job of gaining large brand awareness. But not one of their audiences convert.
This is the common pitfall of big players in the upper 1% of the hierarchy:
They started their business with a struggle, built it into one of the most successful companies with hard-born effort. Only to end up spending money on advertising to people who are not in their target market.
Awareness doesn’t matter if people don’t care about what you’re doing
This comes to the importance of your target market. Not everyone will appreciate your message, but your true customer will
Are Your Customers Receptive To You?
Now, you already know that it is pointless to sell to a big audience. It’s important to niche down and serve people who love you the best — your target market.
But, does your target market want you? They are interested but will they choose you vs. other competitors?
For example, your target market is people who are Athletic and living an active lifestyle. That term itself is actually too broad. Yes, we know that your target is customers who living a healthy way of life but who exactly?
If you are selling protein-based nutritional meat, there’s no way vegetarians will purchase from you. But they are people who also belong to the Athletic niche, you need to cross out people who will not buy from you in the first place.
Still, that is not the only problem. If we go back to our example of a protein-based nutritional meat company. Your target market is people who want to bulk and get bigger. But, you need to consider the factor that they are presently using your competitor’s product. Will they switch over to you instead?
Here comes the switching cost.
How To Steal Your Competitor’s Customers
First, instead of stealing customers away, why don’t we just create new customers and make them loyal to our company?
It’s actually much harder to create new customers versus stealing existing ones.
Like the protein-based nutritional meat case, we discussed earlier, customers need to have a good reason to choose you vs. other competitors
In order to make the customer of your competitors come to you, you need 2 aspects:
- Same experiences, lower price — if you are head-to-head against your competitors in quality and providing value. Then this option will make customer switch over to you since they retain all the same benefits plus a bonus of a lower price
- Best experiences, higher price — offer a solution that your competitors don’t have. one caveat here is not just a better experience. You need to offer a product that helps them solve a bigger problem. A higher price is justifiable. Gillette’s razor was able to profit from this. They turned a product from “‘thick uncomfortable moustaches’ to “trim your beard nicely”
Needless to say, don’t compete on price because customers don’t only buy on price alone. They buy your product on emotion. Debating with their desire if your product is a perfect fit for their life.
Having the best experience is not only limited to adding a new feature to the product, something as simple as having the best customer service can gain you an edge over your competitors.
A professional business person would rather borrow money from a bank with a little higher interest if it means not wasting 45 minutes waiting in line just to cash in a cheque. For the entrepreneur, time is more important than money.
Similarly, you don’t want to be on hold on a telephone and wait for 10 more minutes while the person is redirecting you to the ‘customer complaint department’
We all want to be treated compassionately the same way we treat other people do. And answering your customer’s response immediately might just make them stick with you instead of going to your competitor
Why The ‘Right Time’ & ‘Right Medium’ Is Important
Even the most receptive customers will back away if you don’t show respect. But there are a lot of ways to build trust with your customers.
If you are sending physical mail to your customer, don’t make it look like junk mail. No one opens that. You might a reputable company but if customers realized that you don’t care even just to put it in a nicely hand-written envelope, then they might end the relationship.
Don’t interrupt them late at night or very early in the morning. If you are in a B2B (business-to-business) company, calling at midnight or as early as 5 am will result in a hard look and even your prospects screaming the phone as you interrupt them from this unprecedented time.
But, this problem is now solved well when your target market is scrolling Facebook beyond normal hours, unlike before you are much more welcome. They are more receptive to you interrupting them.
Now, there are a lot more aspects that you need to put boundaries in place. Respects to follow and lines not to cross. What matters is to maintain a strong customer relationship by making sure they stay consistently loyal to your brand. It starts by offering equal respect.
Conclusion
Throughout this article, we have broken many beliefs and opened up new doors. From making sure that business is not a popularity contest, I’ve shared with you what are the 5 Human Drives that make people buy.
We also look at why customers are more important than the product, how to create a customer avatar, and why awareness is not the goal of the game but sales.
Finally, you now know which customers actually fit your company and even bonuses on how to steal your competitor’s customers and showing respect in order to prolong the lifetime relationship between your company and the customer.
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-Jed Silverlake
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About the Author:
Jed Silverlake is a brand journalist & storyteller who has written articles of Fortune 1000 companies & private clients. He specialized in writing brand stories of E-commerce Business, Influencers, Consultants & Coaches. For more content similar to his, you can follow his Medium profile.
