Customers buy to relieve some sort of pain, or fill a need. Sometimes that pain is real, the need genuine, and sometimes it just takes the form of a psychological itch that needs scratching.
Whatever the form and source or type of the pain, nobody buys without it, so your product is medicine for that pain.
Why don’t you tell them that more often?
Be clear: ‘This product is for people who……..’
Many years ago I was marketing manager of the Dairy foods division of the then Australian owned Dairy farmers Ltd. We marketed Ski yogurt, and had been killed by Yoplait who launched with great advertising, packaging innovation, and a pretty good product that had massively increased yoghurt consumption, with them taking all the benefit.
The manufacturing process installed to produce Yoplait ensured that there was no discrete fruit pieces in the end product. It may have been strawberry yogurt, but the product was completely homogeneous. The process Dairy Farmers had installed was different, and we could produce a product with discrete and obvious fruit pieces.
The core of platform of our marketing and innovation processes become ‘Ski: for those who like to see pieces of fruit n their yoghurt. We never used this line, but it was implicit in everything we did.
5 years later, Ski was market leader in a market many times bigger than when Yoplait had launched. While it may not have been painful to buy a fruited yoghurt with no discrete pieces of fruit, when the offer was made, the preference of many became immediately clear.
Sadly, the innovative momentum that drove both Ski and Yoplait was dissipated by a presumed plateau in the market size in the mid nineties, and resultant transfer of resources and energy to kow-towing to retailers.
