You Don’t Buy Flowers, You Buy Romance

What’s the number one mistake marketers make time and time again?

They sell the output, not the outcome.

It’s easy to do — you get lost in your own world of speccing out what a job involves, or the features of a product. But you forget the most important thing — why someone is buying.

Take this as an example:

I walk past this property development 2–3 times a week, but I haven’t once gone past and thought “I know what, I really want to be sold and marketed to today — let’s go in and hear their pitch”.

No offence to Bentley Place, they’re not the only ones who do it, but that’s also part of the problem — they just do what everyone else does and accept it as standard. Rather than trying something new, like “View your dream home”.

Think about what your customers are really buying:

• You don’t buy a mortgage, you buy a home…
• You don’t buy flowers, you buy romance…
• You don’t buy insurance, you buy reassurance…
• You don’t buy an 8 inch drill, you buy an 8 inch hole…
• etc…

You buy the feeling it gives you. So why would a marketer sell the products that THEY want to force on to you?

The best brands are the ones who communicate how it makes their customers feel:

• Coca Cola — there’s a reason they say “taste the feeling”, not “taste the carbonated sugar water, trust us it’s quite nice…”
• Apple — they don’t sell an MP3 player, they start with why and give you 1,000 songs in your pocket.
• Dove sketches — (sorry for the over-used example), but they really get across how people feel about themselves and others.
• John Lewis — tapping into the emotions of people at Christmas, with hugely popular ads year after year.
• Brew Dog — if you ask anyone behind a bar what their job is, the response is a standard “my role is to make you as passionate about craft beers as we are”.

It’s not about you, it’s about how you make them feel.

Once you can understand where your customer is coming from, it makes it so much easier to give them the outcome and feeling they’re looking for.

About The Author

Kevin Gibbons is CEO of Re:signal. You can connect with him on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.