Most businesses are pretty good at telling customers what they do.
Faster. Cheaper. More powerful. More experienced. Better technology. Better service. More features. More choice.
As business owners we spend an enormous amount of time identifying our advantages, polishing them and turning them into carefully crafted marketing messages.
But what if we’re answering the wrong question?
What if the most powerful reason someone buys from you is something you barely talk about at all?
I was reminded of this recently while listening to the brilliant Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy speak at the National Entrepreneurs Convention.
If you have heard Rory speak before, you’ll know that he has a wonderful ability to make you question things that businesses have accepted as obvious for years.
What particularly resonated with me was inverse thinking.
Instead of continually asking:
“What can we improve?”
Try asking:
“What if the thing we think matters… isn’t actually the thing that matters most?”
And that led me to another question that I think every business should spend some time considering:
What are you not talking about that your customer truly values in their buying decision?
Because there is often a sizeable gap between what a company thinks it sells and what a customer believes they are buying.
We tend to improve the obvious thing
Using Rory’s work, imagine a train company wants happier passengers. The obvious answer is to make the trains faster.
It makes perfect logical sense. A faster journey must be a better journey. Except reducing journey times might require billions of pounds of infrastructure investment.
There is another way of approaching the problem.
Instead of asking: “How do we make the journey shorter?”
ask: “How do we make the journey feel better?”
Wi-Fi. Better coffee. Comfortable seats. Reliable information. Somewhere to charge your phone. An environment where you can get some work done.
None of these make the train move any faster. Yet they can radically change the customer’s experience of the journey.
That distinction sits at the heart of much of Rory Sutherland’s thinking: objective value and perceived value are not the same thing. And perceived value is still value.
We see the same phenomenon everywhere.
A hotel doesn’t simply sell a bed – It sells reassurance that when you arrive tired at 10pm, everything will work.
An accountant doesn’t simply sell accounts – They might be selling the feeling that somebody competent is keeping an eye on something the business owner worries about.
A premium car doesn’t simply transport you from A to B – It might sell comfort, identity, reassurance, enjoyment, status or confidence.
A software platform doesn’t simply sell functionality – It may sell the confidence that you won’t have to explain to your board why a critical system fell over on Monday morning.
That last 10% of functionality your sales team loves talking about might not be what wins the deal at all.
Customers rarely buy using the spreadsheet we imagine
Businesses love rational explanations as they are easy to measure – Price. Speed. Output. Specification. Efficiency. ROI.
Customers certainly consider these things. But buying decisions also contain another layer – Risk. Trust. Certainty. Convenience. Status. Familiarity. Reassurance. Ease. The desire not to make a mistake.
Rory has spoken about this in the context of business relationships too. The theoretically rational buyer might constantly shop around for the lowest possible price. But a long-term supplier relationship can offer something harder to put into a procurement spreadsheet: reliability, goodwill and the confidence that someone will help when things go wrong.
Those things have enormous value. They are simply harder to measure.
And therein lies the problem.
Businesses naturally talk about the things they can prove. Customers frequently buy because of things they can feel.
Try turning your proposition upside down
This is where inverse thinking becomes useful.
Take one of the things your business proudly promotes and temporarily assume it isn’t important.
Then ask what would be left.
If your proposition is: “We deliver faster.”
Ask: Why does speed matter?
Perhaps the customer doesn’t actually want speed. Perhaps they want certainty. They want to know exactly when something will arrive so they can stop worrying about it.
Those are very different propositions.
“Fast delivery” says: We are quick.
“Guaranteed delivery by 10am, with live tracking throughout” says: You don’t need to worry.
The operational capability may be almost identical. The customer value is completely different.
Or imagine your proposition is: “You get a dedicated account manager.”
Why does the customer value that? Perhaps they don’t care that somebody has the job title “Account Manager”.
What they value is: I don’t have to explain myself to a different person every time I call.
Again, that’s a much more human proposition.
Find the sentence your customer says when you’re not in the room
Here’s an exercise I think is worth doing.
Forget your marketing materials for a moment. Forget the brand guidelines. Forget your sales presentation.
Imagine one of your best customers recommending you privately to a friend.
What would they actually say?
Probably not: “They provide market-leading, innovative solutions delivered by a highly experienced team.”
Nobody talks like that.
They might say things like:
“They just sort things out.”
“They always answer the phone.”
“I know they’ll tell me if I’m about to make a bad decision.”
“They’re more expensive, but I never have to worry about it.”
“They understand our business, so I don’t have to explain everything from scratch.”
Those sentences are marketing gold.
Because hidden inside them is the real value proposition.
The thing your customer values may be something your competitors barely mention because everyone in your sector is busy talking about the same rational benefits.
Look for what everyone else has stopped noticing
Inverse thinking encourages us to question the accepted rules of a market.
If everyone competes on speed, perhaps certainty wins.
If everyone competes on choice, perhaps simplicity wins.
If everyone competes on price, perhaps reassurance wins.
If everyone talks about technology, perhaps human accessibility wins.
If everyone talks about how much their product does, perhaps the opportunity lies in explaining how little the customer has to do.
Sometimes competitive advantage isn’t created by adding another feature.
Sometimes it comes from recognising something customers already value and giving them permission to value it.
That might be convenience.
It might be familiarity.
It might be the confidence of dealing with a company that has been around for 30 years.
It might be being able to speak to a human.
It might be knowing the price won’t suddenly change.
It might be the fact that your product looks good sitting in their office.
It might even be that doing business with you makes them look good internally.
None of these necessarily appear on a conventional features-and-benefits list.
But that doesn’t mean they don’t influence the decision.
The question worth asking
So perhaps the next time you’re reviewing your marketing, don’t immediately ask:
“What else should we tell people about?”
Turn the problem around.
Ask: What does our customer genuinely value that we’re currently not talking about?
Then go one step further. What do customers value that perhaps even they don’t articulate particularly well?
That’s where things get interesting.
Because your biggest marketing opportunity may not be inventing another reason to buy. It may simply be discovering the reason people were buying from you all along.
And having the courage to talk about it.