In the 1920s, a nephew of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud called Edward Bernays took his uncle’s ideas about people’s unspoken and often unrecognised emotional needs and applied them to products. In doing so, he created the modern industry of marketing.
Shoes, for example, would previously have been sold as either long-lasting or cheap. They would not have been sold on how attractive they were, and how attractive this would subliminally make the wearer to the opposite sex. Products were now more than the sum of their parts, and so they could charge more than just their costs.
At that time, women did not smoke, because it was seen as dirty (not unhealthy): Bernays put women smokers next to the Statue of Liberty, and implied that women didn’t smoke because men told them not to. Smoking could be your way of showing your independence.
The message was clear, even if the messaging was deliberately not: find the unspoken need your customer has that your product can meet, and you will sell more at higher prices.
We already talked about how “better” didn’t need to mean objectively “better” in “But Better Is Better”. Now let’s open ourselves up to the reality that perception is everything. It isn’t about the value you create for your customers – it’s about the value they perceive you have created.
You wouldn’t think that fizzy, black, sweetened drinks would be able to achieve global domination and be impossible to copy, but by associating their products with all of the solutions to the insecurities of teenage years (popularity, good looks, fun-times, love, friends), Coke and Pepsi have created a global duopoly and enjoyed the benefits for more than 100 years, while helping create one of the other paranoid insecurities of teens: being fat.
You might think such things are either (1) beneath you or (2) out of your reach, but they aren’t.
- Your cake shop might make the first birthday cake that a child remembers, that a busy parent doesn’t have the time or skill to make themselves, but they know you will give it the attention it needs, and make the moment magical.
- Your cafe might be the place the same busy parent finds a moment to escape, to calm down, unwind, or chat to friends.
- Eating your incredibly spicy curry might become such a favourite with local students, that they make a competition of it, and it becomes an institution.
- Your business services company might make it so much easier to launch a company that more people take that first step into entrepreneurship.
When you finish a WhatsApp, Skype or Facebook Messenger phone call, the app will often ask you for your satisfaction with the call. I normally just swipe it away, but when I have spoken to my daughter, who is thousands of miles away, I click five stars, even if the line was fuzzy, because I just can’t emotionally one-star a call with my daughter.
Products are mixed with emotion, and our emotions are mixed up with products, services and the companies that make them.
This value might not be “real”, but it is really valuable.
It can make the thing you’re selling priceless.
While all commodities have a price, and all companies want to buy the best “value” product, and will know how to price it, people don’t know how to price emotions. They can’t negotiate with the floods of hormones that tell them they’re in love, hungry, angry, impatient or stressed. It’s why you should never go shopping hungry.
It’s why your marketing and marketing research will become so important as the company progresses. To start with, yes, it’s important that you tell potential customers that your product exists, but once that is achieved, they need to know what you can do for them. That doesn’t mean selling them the widget they need, but satisfying the emotional need they may not even be aware they had.
Better really is better, particularly if it’s perceived to be better. Answer these questions before moving on to the only business model in the world that is bigger than better.