Know-How Exchange : Customer Behavior

Dear faheem_aries

What a great question!

If more marketers asked (and answered) this question before sticking their wares out for sale, they'd make more money.

When making a buying decision, all kinds of factors crop up, some of which include: price ratio against benefit outcome, need, want, desire, pain, whim, impulse, solution, and our desire for social acceptance.

People buy to make statements about themselves (Look at me, I can afford this thing); to fulfill needs (I am exchanging this amount of money for this thing in order to solve this problem); and to make declarations to other people (I have bought this thing, therefore I fit in with this elite group).

The implications here are also that if you, as a fellow social human being ALSO buy this thing, you'll also be more acceptable in some way or other, or that you'll be ahead of your friends, neighbours, colleagues, siblings, and so on.

It's from this complex social soup that we get and create our definitions of value. Whether online or off, the overwhelming majority of buying decisions and triggers are based on emotions.

Emotions drive our senses of state (desire, want, need and the complex web of feelings and belief structures each of us carries with us and builds around our lives through personal past experience, and through personal projection of an imagined future).

We then use logical attribution to justify our emotional choices.

The practical upshot of all this is that the more you as a marketer can align your projected benefits and value with the deeply felt need of your customer, the more the customer connects the benefits and sense of buying your goods and services with their desired outcome.

So the customer sells the merchandise to themselves.

I hope this helps. Good luck to you.

Gary Bloomer
The Direct Response Marketing Guy™
Wilmington, DE, USA