Stop marketing your product or service

By Isaiah O’Connor

With the title of this post, you may be thinking  “Wait, what? Did a business guy just tell me to stop marketing what I sell?” And the answer to that is no you need to market what you sell but you need to think more about why people buy what you are selling.   To quote an article from the National Association of Sales People.

“People buy products or services based on emotional needs or wants, and then justify their purchase logically.”- Jim Klein NASP

I am sure you can make some exceptions to this, for example, if I need to buy a part for my dishwasher I just look to find a replacement part, not a lot of emotion involved. However, for the most part, this is very true. 

This means as a balloon decorator, I really do not sell balloons or balloon decor, I sell the feelings of joy and happiness they bring, or for businesses, I sell a way to bring attention to the business and help drive traffic. Even with this in mind, I forget to market the feeling of the balloons but only focus on the cool designs I make. When I do this people may like what they see but they simply do not make a purchase.

Yes, there is a time to go into details of your product and sell them on your actual product, but that is after you have them in your door, and at that point, when they have already been emotionally invested in your product, all you are doing is figuring out which of your products or services serves them best.

Take for example Mazda’s catch phrase. Zoom Zoom.  The phrase speaks nothing about the physical qualities of the product. If you had no clue you would have not even know its about cars. But yet its a very powerful message. It is an emotional message. For me, it invokes the freedom, fun, and excitement of driving. The message is this “Buy our cars and you will have freedom fun and excitement as you drive.”  If this message resonates with you, you are more likely to step onto a dealership where the salesperson will show you the logical features to justify buying from them. 

So when it comes to marketing, you need to focus on the emotional impact your product or service makes, and not what it is comprised of.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Entrepreneur

Isaiah O’Connor CBDO Atheoz.com

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