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When Did This Become About You?
How to Tap Into Your Customer’s Inner Desires for
Fun and Big Profits
Creating the Product or Service: Wants VS. Needs
You’ve heard it plenty of times – find a market
with a problem, find their solution, and throw yourselves in
their path so that they throw their money at you. For the most
part this is good advice. However, let’s break this down
further since essentially what we are referring to is meeting a
customer’s wants and needs.
You see, the problem is that it’s easy for our
ego to get in the way when we start a business. We may know
what a customer needs and so we set off to create that product
or service. Then we are completed befuddled when no one is
buying our product.
What happened? We didn’t create a product that
people WANTED.
If you decide to create a business that meets
people’s needs, you better also be sure that these people want
your solution.
For example, let’s suppose you run into a
specific population of smokers. They love gathering on Saturday
nights on their front porches, enjoying good company, their
favorite beverage, and a pack of Marlboro Reds.
The problem is, this particular group has a
history of lung cancer in their families. And due to the long
history of smoking each of these people has, coupled with the
large number of cigarettes they smoke each day, you know they
are walking a dangerous path health-wise.
What do these people NEED? This particular group
needs to quit smoking before they meet their untimely ends. But
if you attempt to market a stop-smoking product to them, you’re
the one likely to meet an untimely death. Quite simply, this
particular population of smokers doesn’t want to quit, so you’re
wasting your time and money trying to sell that sort of product
to them.
At this point you have a choice:
1.
You can find a
market of smokers who DOES want to stop smoking, and sell them
your product.
2.
You can figure
out what your “porch smokers” actually want, and sell it to them
(discount cigarettes come to mind).
3.
Or you can
just choose another market and product.
You can see this same sort of example playing out
across many different populations, especially in regards to
health. For example, you may find overweight people who need to
lose weight, but they want clothes that make them look slimmer.
Or you may find teenagers that need a dependable car, but the
teenager is more interested in what the car looks like as
opposed to whether it will need costly repairs.
Sometimes the product you are putting on the
market is so revolutionary that people have yet to realize they
need or want it. In that case, if you decide to proceed you
will likely spend a lot of time and money educating your
potential customers. This is one of those cases where being
second into the market may be more beneficial, since your
competitor spent the time and money educating the market, and
now you can swoop in and get your market share.
For example, marketer John Reese was one of the
first people to come out with an autoresponder. People didn’t
realize they needed it, and they for sure didn’t want it. In
fact, they didn’t even know what it was. As such, John and his
closest competitors had to educate the market before he could
sell autoresponders.
Now of course when you say “autoresponder” most
people want it for their business plus they tend to need it if
they’re running a mailing list. Even though the competition may
be tough, at least if you entered that market now you wouldn’t
need to explain to potential customers why they wanted and
needed your autoresponder service.
So what’s the bottom line? Know your market! No
matter who you are marketing to and what product or service
you’re putting out, if you want to succeed make sure your market
wants what you have. Better yet, make sure your market
DESPERATELY wants your product!
Now the next question you need to answer…
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