Focus on users more than buyers and you’ll get more of both

I stumbled across an interesting study about how great brands focus more on users than they do on buyers.

Seems counterintuitive at first, certainly when viewed through the traditional lens of marketing’s job being to just go get the damn buyers and leave the rest to other functions. I.e. inner voice of the product builders… “Marketing, we make the thing, you just go drum up demand for people to buy it.”

Demand? Ok, yeah, that part I’m good with, but what kind? The study argues great brands work more on creating demand to use the product than they do on creating demand to buy the product.

I love that for a bunch of reasons but chief among them because it captures the transition that still so much of “marketing” needs to make… not just in the direct to consumer world but in the enterprise realm too (maybe even more needed in BtoB).

That’s the move from simply being the folks who spin a good yarn about whatever thing other people in the org make, to becoming active shapers and evangelists of the total experience customers have with your company. Because everything about your marketing will be smarter and better if it’s informed by how good (or not) of an experience you’re delivering to the people who use what you make.

It’s not that promotion, lead gen and acquisition of new customers aren’t critical. Of course, they are. But when you become obsessed with the experience people (both current and canceled customers) have actually using what you provide and with why they do so in their own terms, you’ll acquire sort of a double super power that makes this users over buyers (or usage over purchase) focus so valuable.

Super power number one, armed with all that usage know-how you’ll be more successful on the retention front, working with other functions, in keeping customers and expanding your relationship with them. Makes sense. But the other great thing about becoming a Jedi on the usage of your product is how much better you’ll also become at all those things related to getting new people to purchase it.

That’s the beauty of centering on users and their experience. It’ll raise your game on multiple fronts. Focus less exclusively on purchase for example, and you’ll get better at triggering it.

Here’s an example of how that happens, in this case when you think about how your brand is positioned through more of a usage than a purchase lens…

Mind vs. Life
The old saw question in terms of brand used to be “what position do you want to own in the mind of the customer?” What do you want them to perceive?

The result was lots of focus on finding just the right combination of words about you that could win that elusive neural real estate in the heads of prospects, and keep it from some other company. Sure there may have been some inputs into the wordfest from current customer data, but more often than not the mad lib exercise ends up much more about the view looking out from your product/org than it is looking back from the world customers actually live in.

In a usage-focused brand context on the other hand, the positioning question is “how do you want to fit into and improve the lives of your customer”. What do you want them to experience?

Training your focus this way immediately pushes your gaze outward, beyond your org/product, because you have to better understand the life (individual, organizational, both) you’re trying to fit into. Not only is that inherently human, relatable work that engages your curiosity and interest in who you serve. Most importantly it also requires you to ask more, and more interesting, questions. And that’s where the intelligence starts to pile up.

“Why? Say more about that? Hmmm… that’s interesting, then what happened?”

That’s because when you get into a usage mindset, your creative energy moves rapidly to understanding what people actually experience instead of just what they perceive. And to get at that, your questions have to change. They get more objective, they stack up on each other, and branch out beyond your product to the rest of customers’ lives around their direct interaction with you. There’s less focus on what people think or feel and more on what they did or do.

”What was happening then?” “What did you do before that?” “Why was that important?”

Questions follow questions and before you know it you’ve gone beyond talking about your offering and you’re onto what’s going on in multiple parts of customers’ lives, onto discussions of what progress they’re trying to make in all sorts of areas. Not surprisingly you get better, more textured info that provide masses of actionable clues about how to serve people better and, to this point of fueling your acquisition efforts better, reach them more effectively.

A few examples:

Targetable consideration triggers - what else was going on in the customer’s life, often not obviously connected to what you do, when they first started thinking about the need for a product like yours? “I moved, started a new job, my relationship changed, got married, renovated my house, my spouse joined this group…”. Maybe the trigger events are different in your world but chances are they’re targetable and could help you more efficiently find folks in similar moments where your value prop is high.

Content agenda - when you dig in on usage with customers you often find adjacent things in life they really struggle with. Like if you’re in any sort of physical product business these days, maybe you encounter consistent gripes people have about how to manage packaging material and avoid waste/guilt. Or maybe there are helpful bits of knowledge to share for managing the consideration triggers you uncovered. Whatever the case, content you create to help them as part of relationship building can be just as powerful for catching the attention of potential new folks encountering similar hurdles.

Competitor not who you think - sometimes walking way back down the decision pathway with customers leads to a realization that you’re not competing with who you thought. Maybe a perceived foe turns out actually to be a good warm up act for your offering, or folks are turning to something completely different to do the job than you thought. Either way there’s targeting and customer location gold in those knowledge hills.

Across all these examples and so many other parts of the business, the point is the same. The days of marketing being about spinning a tale to get folks through the door, then handing them off to go spin another yarn, are past. Marketers and product people (and support folks, and delivery, you get the idea) have to be deeply entwined.

The experience your customers have is the brand and the brand is the experience. So building a brand - all of it, from acquisition through retention - has to center on how people use what you sell, how it fits into and improves their lives (or doesn’t).

Understand that on a really deep level and all the parts of your go-to-market mix will be so much the better for it.