Why Convenience Is Not Always The Answer Your Customers Are Looking For?
What do customers want?
Yes, it is quite a broad question. And you might think that the answer largely depends on the product. Let’s say it’s about cars and cakes. What would someone what to see in their car? Or what type of cake excites people the most?
Even though these two products are completely different than each other, they can be sold only if they are successful enough to evoke certain emotions in the targeted consumer group. If you still can’t see the correlation between emotions and customer behaviors let me explain it with a real-life example:
In 1950, General Mills (one of the biggest food companies in the US) was trying to find a successful marketing strategy for its Betty Crocker brand of instant cake mixes. Even though the preparation of the mix was extremely easy by just adding water in the mix, the product didn’t really greet with much enthusiasm among the housewives which was the company's initial target group. Why something so convenient wasn’t appreciated by the customers?
Having the same question in mind, the company worked with psychologist and marketing expert Ernest Ditcher to understand the problem and find a solution to the case. And it turned out that because making a cake from the scratch is more appreciated and symbolized proper baking skills, using just a cake mixture would not only underestimate the cooking skills of housewives and make them feel incompetent but it would also be considered rude by their guests when they are served a basic cake mix.
To solve the problem, Ernest Ditcher suggested something quite counterintuitive. It was to leave out some of the ingredients in the cake mix along with the dried eggs and allow women to add them to the mixture. And this idea became known as the ‘egg theory’ in the marketing world.
Apparently, this strategy was successful enough to make women feel good about their cooking skills and turn the cake mixture into something more than a mere store-bought product. It allowed people to feel more attached to the cake by letting them add ingredients to the making process. And the lack of promoting this feeling of personal attachment was the reason why the cake mix wasn’t a successful launch in the beginning. Would you expect that?
Coming back to the cars, what would be that one thing that everyone would want in their car? It’s hard to say and even harder to measure by trying to find out every potential customer’s needs and wants. However, a small firm called Local Motors, Inc. seems to have an answer to that.
By allowing customers to design and physically build their own car over a period of days, this company gives a priceless experience to their customers. With the help of experts, the customers can design and shape the final version of their cars. In a way, they would get to experience the creation of their own cars which makes the whole thing even more meaningful than just buying a car (even though picking a ready-to-drive one would be way ‘convenient’).
Both of these examples require consumers to put effort. Yet it is that effort that makes the whole process and the final version of the products more meaningful. Customers become more attached to products because they took part in the creation process and therefore put more meaning to them.
Logically thinking, the most effortless way of cooking a cake should have been the most preferred one but it wasn’t.
Because at the end of the day products are nothing but tools to stimulate strong emotions to make customers want to purchase them. No matter how different they are in shape and physical purposes, what you sell is always more than a tangible thing because human beings are not always rational and that’s a part of what makes us human.
