Pain- the motivator.

Fundamental marketing starts with the pain; the reason a lot of things we do exist. Without a thorough understanding of pain, we cannot do much. Pain had two key components: sensory and emotional and is caused by a stimuli that has a measurable impact to not only the target but also his or her surroundings. A great marketer will first explore and define it as accurately as possible.

The reason we do this is to understand the motivation of the target, the influencer and the actions a marketer has to take to move through the first three steps.  Here is one personal experience to illustrate the point.

Runners knee

I have a bad knee, that has kept me from running for almost two years,  a variety of reasons over 4+ years have introduced a degree of discomfort into one knee.  I decide to start running and blow it up by the third run take a few months break and repeat it again. Once in a while, upon suddenly getting up the knee cannot take my weight- one such episode happened in the office. My employee noticed my "bad" and the next day offered me a Chinese heat patch to fix my "pain".

Let us walk through the understanding. Emotionally, I just had a bad knee- no pain until it was brought into my attention. I was in-fact experiencing pain- dull throbbing pain most of the time and sharp intense one that prevented me from placing weight on my leg.  The heat patch was applied immediately and I did experience reduction in pain in an hour or so.

Experience breakdown

 Let me breakdown the buyers journey. With one simple gesture- not a lot of fanfare but a simple act of kindness, my employee took me through three of the 9 steps outlined in my previous blog :

2. Acknowledge the pain
3. Quantify the pain
4. Know a solution

All of this happened in a fraction of a second. The steps 5 and 6 were completely bypassed and step number 7 was staring me in the face. It was easy to act- which I did. The product did its job and I am not on step 9 talking about it to make my point.

After exhausting the Chinese patches, I switched to Salonpas and  the knee is healing well.

Marketers challenge

Would it not be great if every single instance where the products we are marketing are readily available and easy to try? I have successfully tried it and works like a charm. You don’t have to go with the laundry list of features and benefits. Just address the pain in the instance it matters most.  The patch heals back and every body part. Nowhere did it say- bad knee. But once it lessened my pain- pain patches have an evangelist for free. Let your imagination run wild on the possibilities with your products.

The new world of marketing

"All marketers are liars" is not nearly as inaccurate as numbers don’t lie- numbers look you straight in the eyes and lie. But this is not what this blog is about- it is about marketing as I understand it and succinctly phrased by Dr. Kotler " the science and art of exploring, creating and delivering value". Having spent almost a decade doing just this, let me address the science of marketing.

As a marketer, you have to simply pick a complex environment and scientifically break it down into a simple actionable system. Contrary to  much of what I have heard in the business world, the new millennium has not changed marketing, its just the mechanics.

Value

 Value needs a pain or a problem or a cost, there can be no value without some pain that hurts someone. That someone is now a target and the job of the marketer begins. Let us break down the complex experience of the target that a marketer has to:

1. Have the pain or problem.
2. Acknowledge the pain
3. Be able to quantify the pain
4. Know there is a solution to the pain
5. Be able to compare the various alternatives
6. Choose the right solution
7.  Try, Buy Use the solution
8. Confirm the pain in #3 is reduced or eliminated
9. Talk about how the solution changed his/her life

These are a long list of steps but broken down individually, each step can take anywhere from nano seconds to months but the process remains the same.  There are various frameworks that reduce the number of steps- but you do so at the risk of neglecting or rushing through the process. Both of these scenarios hurt your chances of success.

Providing value

This formula has not changed- works for clothes, raincoats, uniforms, software, apps, learning, services, solutions, storage, servers and even powerpoint decks that looks very pretty; everything i have personally marketed throughout my life. The key is to keep it simple and you have a customer and the customers daughter-in-law as a customer for life.

Next.

 These set of blogs are my attempt to elaborate on my personal learnings from the software industry both at large corporations and startups.