Painkiller. Vitamin. Candy
How is your product perceived?
Painkillers are a must-have. When you feel pain, you’ll pay to have a painkiller take your pain away. Vitamins are nice to have. You know you need a regular dose, but you also know you will be fine if you skip your dose. Candies are sweeteners. It’s hard to stop yourself even when you know you shouldn’t indulge so much.
It’s much easier to market a painkiller. The tough part is usually identifying your ideal customer and position your brand as the right solution to their pain points. If you go a step further to engage your customer, you might figure out the pattern that leads to the pain point you’re solving. If you know that, you just might be able to regularly trigger that pattern and then position your brand at the end of the trail.
Vitamin, on the other hand, is tricky. Your customers love you but feel they can do without you. Your strategy should consistently accentuate your value proposition until your brand is associated with the problem you’re solving in the subconscious of the customer. If your product has a network effect, you might be a step closer to distributing to a mass-market. To some, coffee is a painkiller that gives a jolt of energy. To others, coffee is a vitamin. Understand your market.
Interestingly, candies are much easier to market. They offer pleasure and instead of solving the pain, they numb it. Part of its core is offering fun and some virtual prizes that keep the user to stay much longer than anticipated. I can argue that most games fall under this category.
You’ve come this far, great. However, I should mention that while there isn’t a hierarchy, if there is, candies won’t be at the bottom. Humans are interesting, we are more interested in painkillers and candies. Vitamins are for when we remember. The typical customer either wants its problem solved or numbed, vitamins do neither.
Ride-hailing services are painkillers. You need them when you have to go out, well except you’re driving your car or walking. Social media started out as vitamins — a nice platform to meet strangers. Now, they’re painkillers, bridging distance and enabling communications between people irrespective of the distance at almost no cost — well, your privacy is the cost you pay. Candy crush game is candy. I am sure you guess the last one right. :)
Oh, one more thing. I mentioned earlier that coffee is a painkiller to some and vitamins to others. If you’re used to driving your car, you may not consider a ride-hailing service as a painkiller. Social media applications are painkillers to some — a tool for communication as well as generating revenue. To some others, well, they stop using it totally. Candies seem to be great at doing one thing — offer pleasure, unless pleasure isn’t your thing.
I hope this helps.
