What Motivates Your Customers? (Strategic Tuesday/Positioning)

Hello, I’m Jim Glover, That Branding Guy for Once a Day Marketing.  Today is Strategic Tuesday and I’m going to give you the opportunity to play psychologist and put your customers on the couch.

To create strategy that will motive customers to buy your product, you have to understand what drives them when they are buying your product.  Let’s look at several factors.

First, is the functional benefit, perhaps the motivation is they love what your product does.

Second, the emotional benefit, how the product makes them feel when they use it.

The third factor is what we call the self-expressive benefit, and that is the association customers want with your product.  For instance, they might want to be seen walking into your building because there is a certain status associated with that.

Lastly, the driver may be something as simple as price.  Customers may be drawn to your product because of favorable pricing or perceived value.

Since you can’t actually put your customers on the couch, you’ll have to find another way to determine what is motivating them.  One option is formal research.  This is often very expensive and may not be a practical approach for a small business.  However, you may be able to leverage studies that have been done which identify the buying behaviors of customers similar to yours.

A simple option may be to put yourself into the head of your customer.  You know your customers and have experience with them.  Do a little role playing and see if you can uncover the motivator that is driving their purchasing behavior.

You can also let your experience be your guide.  You’ve been in the business, understand your product, understand people in general, and your experience tells you which attributes are the motivators for customers to buy your product.

The reason for going through this strategic exercise today is pretty straightforward.  If you know what motivates your customers, you are going to be better able to provide what they want.  That is going to drive more business, create more satisfied customers and in the end that is going to enhance the bottom line.

That concludes Strategic Tuesday.  Join us tomorrow for Action Wednesday.  To discuss an online or face to face service engagement and enhance the marketing and branding for your organization, contact James Glover: (505) 501-1330 or onceadaymarketing@gmail.com.  I’m Jim Glover, That Branding Guy, for Once a Day Marketing and we’ll see you next time.