How Much is That Doggie in the Window?
Whether you’re well established or just setting up shop, here’s a marketing lesson I first learned the hard way back in 1986.
Most of your customers or clients either won’t—or don’t—care about you.
I learned this lesson when I wrote my first business letter to a printer. I spent three days crafting my message, adding little jokes and odds and ends, only to have my boss strike out fully 75 percent of my artful content with a large red pen.
She told me that my job was not to entertain people but to get to the point and to tell the person I was writing to about them, not me.
I was crestfallen. But looking back, my rewritten letter was a thousand times better than the original and it made the point: your customers care about themselves, not you.
You can do nothing about this. Deal with it.
To certain readers, this not caring attitude of your clients or customers might come as a surprise. But put yourself in their shoes.
When you buy gas, do you care about the oil company?
When you buy groceries, do you care about the suppliers or producers of the foodstuffs you’re buying, or about the clerk at the register?
When you go to the movies, do you care about the director, the actors, the production crew, the projectionist, or the popcorn vendor?
My bet is your answer to all these questions is no.
Your customers or clients don’t care how long you’ve been in business or what you did before you began doing what you do. And they don’t care about the machines, gizmos, gadgets, or training you use to produce whatever it is you’re offering.
To your customers, pretty much everything about you and the service you offer are largely—gasp!—irrelevant.
However, what your customers do care about is themselves, and, more importantly, just what it is that your product, service, or goods can do for them. You may think people care, but most of your customers or clients do not, at least, not about you, so I suggest the sooner you wean yourself off this notion the happier you’ll be.
If your customers or clients care about anything at all it’s this: will your goods, product, or services fulfill their needs, cater to their wants. solve their problems, and make their lives easier.
This isn’t to say that your customers and clients are selfish, because for the most part, they’re not. But it underscores the fact that generally, people buy things because those things fulfill a need in some way, not because the supplier’s a nice person. And that need is normally an emotional need, not a logical one. Logic comes into the equation later as a way of justifying the emotional need.
If your product, goods, or service meet those customer needs, great, you’re part way towards success. You’re still not out of the woods, but if you can say yes, your goods meet people’s needs, you’ll at least be ahead of the pack.
But if the answer’s no, if your goods, services, and products fail to meet people’s needs, no trail of breadcrumbs in the world will set you straight.
Are you telling your customers about you? Or about them?
The other thing to think about is this. Who are your best 20 percent in terms of your customers? And of those, who are the top 5 percent? I’m asking this because it’s a good idea to spend 70 to 80 percent of your marketing time on those two 20 and 5 percent because those are the people for whom the recession is least important. So they’re still spending money.
This means you need to be talking to these people in terms that are different to the ways you’d speak to your less well off customers. Why? Because the top list have more money to spend. I hope this helps.
