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.