Do You Make This Marketing Mistake?

Day692
For the past several days I’ve been sharing articles that I’ve found online while trying to learn more about marketing, websites and ecommerce. This one made me look at my online store and ask myself how I can market my products in a new way.

In a recent piece in the Harvard Business Review, the authors remind us what a normal person wants when they buy something. And no, it is NOT the thing they buy. Harvard marketing professor Theodore Levitt, they write, used to tell his students,"People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!" (Harvard Business Review, 12.05)

Think about your product. Are you selling its features, benefits, ingredients, or scientific validity? Or are you offering what someone might do or make happen with it? Like the drill - it's used to make a hole where there was none before. So when talking about your products, especially when you're talking to women, tell first how you used the products - what they did for you. Tell YOUR story (AKA Your First Date Script). Women (a big fat 80% majority of network marketers) always want to know FIRST how others are using the products you are offering - what they DO with it. Not what's in it. That's a big difference between how women and men buy. (Marketing to Women, Barletta).

So, what if you start with YOUR story? My company's introducing a product for women who... (...who want to get X done, like I did). Then you tell how YOU use the product and how it helped you do X. How it gave you the "quarter-inch hole" you wanted (AKA Your First Date Script). You end it by asking for someone like you - someone who wants to get the thing done that YOU got done.

Professor Levitt had the insight: Consumers, us, want to get things done. We all buy stuff (and hire people) to get those things done, including buying it just to be able to show it or talk about it with others. So, what 'got done' for you, by using your product? Next ask yourself: might there be others out there who'd like to know about a product that did that for you? And if the answer is yes, that is your market. Isn't it?

About the author: Kim Klaver is Harvard & Stanford educated. Her 20 years experience in network marketing have resulted in a popular blog, http://KimKlaverBlogs.com a podcast http://YourGreatThing.com and a giant resource site, http://BananaMarketing.com