Spotlight on Marketing

Should We Give Them What They Want?

Posted on 13 November 2010

I love Elizabeth Purvis, “The Marketing Goddess”.

In the latest issue of her e-newsletter (November 10, 2010), Elizabeth wrote: “If you want to create more money in your business, add more value! So what does it mean to add value? Quite simply, it means: give people what they want.”

But I’m confused about that. People don’t usually KNOW what they want, and they don’t know how to articulate what they want. Nobody WANTED a telephone, a pet rock or a Kindle before those things were offered to them, yet entrepreneurs took a calculated risk and chose to offer those products in the marketplace. And people might say they want product/service/result X because they don’t know that product/service/result Y is available to them, or they don’t even believe that it’s possible for them.

Don’t people hire a consultant precisely because they want that consultant to say: “Based on my experience, and based on what you’ve said you want, this is what I think you need. This is what I recommend.”?

Let me give you an example. Many years ago, I walked into a telecommunications shop and said to the salesman: “I want an answering machine for my office phone.” He could have sold me an answering machine, and I probably would have been satisfied. But he didn’t do that; instead, what he said was: “Ah, actually, what would work much better for you is if you subscribe to our digital service - it’s built in to your phone so you don’t need a separate answering machine.  He realised that I didn’t really want an answering machine; I wanted the RESULT that I thought the machine would give me. And he showed me a better, cheaper way to get that result.

When a client says to me “I want you to do task A for me”, I believe it’s my ethical responsibility as a consultant to say “OK, fine. And have you considered all the marketing implications of that? Maybe we should be doing B instead, and here’s why.”

So how do we balance giving our clients what they say they want with what we believe from experience might give them even better results? Do we have the right to tell people what we think they “need”? Isn’t it our job to help people articulate more clearly what they want, rather than just accepting their first answer? Isn’t that where the value lies? I really don’t know.

What are your thoughts about this?