got a minute?

Try this quick thought experiment:

From an informed Sales perspective, what marketing teams and customers see as your “Product” isn’t actually what you’re selling. It’s simple. We aren’t talking about a THING. Here, I refer to an Experience; the satisfaction of an instinct at the core of every human being: the desire for change, to gain knowledge, and experience success. Taken just a step further it becomes even easier to see how there may not be a tangible product at all. At least not the one the customer really wants.

Aside from routine trips to the grocery store, and sometimes even then, too, we aren’t really purchasing “thing.s” We move money from one side of the ledger to the other because of Hope. We hope, deep down, we’ll get to experience that blessed state of satisfaction that goes hand in hand with the transaction itself. So, we’re buying the way we FEEL when we make the purchase. The risk, the gamble, the HOPE that we are moving from one state to another, better place. As such, it gets easier and easier to understand the transition between what we want and the ways we convince ourselves it’s exactly what we need again and again. We accumulate “stuff.” But this is more important than most of us ever imagine: Consumers typically buy the IDEA that they move IMMEDIATELY from one state to yet another, better place when purchasing the “product.”

Get to know the kind of people who buy what you’re selling, and then create a simple process to move them from where they are now to what they really want: Satisfaction. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling. And you can take that, as they say, to the bank.

Required reading:

https://hbr.org/2007/02/understanding-customer-experience

Sam Heard, Creative Director
BUCKLEY | HEARD