Feature: What are You Really Selling?

By Sherry Chiger

It’s crucial to inquire, “What are we truly offering?” Neglecting this question can limit your sales pitch or marketing messages to merely the tangible product or service.

Frequently, individuals aren’t seeking the product or service itself. Instead, they’re drawn to the benefits or returns derived from it.

By delving deeper than the product alone and understanding what people genuinely desire, you’ll find the answer to “What are we really selling?”

During the depths of the Great Depression, Revlon founder Charles Revson described cosmetics as “hope in a jar.” His awareness that he was selling not a commodity but something less tangible helped him grow his business into an empire.

That “something less tangible” could be a longing for positive change (which hope is, at its core). Or it could be an emotion: joy, comfort, pride. Or it could be both. You could tap into an emotion while satisfying the prospective customer with a solution to a problem. Adopting this mindset will bolster your business, just as it did for Charles Revson.

Solving for X

Most people are dissatisfied with at least some aspect of their life. It can be something as major as the state of their marriage or as minor as having to repeatedly get up from their desk to refill their water bottle. One marketing approach is to zero in on this aspect, view it as a problem, and offer a solution. “If you think about it, even the most basic widgets are solving a problem for somebody somewhere,” says creative and content strategist Kelly Lack, whose clients have included Fenty Beauty and Williams-Sonoma. “And if you can effectively position your widget, now it’s a solution. Not just a widget.”

For some products and services, identifying the problem might seem easy. Jim Keenan (better known by the mononym Keenan), President/CEO of consultancy A Sales Guy Inc., cites rice as an example: “Why does the person want the rice? Do they want the rice for a wedding, to make a curry, to feed the poor? Everything behind that why drives that decision.” If you believe a common problem among your audience is that rice is too sticky, you’d want to market fluffy, nonsticky rice. Then again, your audience might have a problem finding rice that is sticky enough, in which case you’d want to market glutinous rice.

You can’t assume that because you prefer nonsticky rice, your audience does too. “A lot of times marketers don’t do sufficient research,” says Bart Sichel, President of marketing and corporate strategy consultancy bps Captura. “All these marketers think they don’t need to do research or focus groups. In 99.9 percent of cases, you do.”

Sichel believes you should perform both qualitative and quantitative research to best determine the problems your audience wants your product to solve. “Qualitative surfaces the ideas,” he explains. “Quantitative helps tabulate the direction and the degree.”

Focus groups and one-on-one interviews fall under qualitative research. When leading this sort of research, it’s particularly important that your biases and assumptions don’t come through. Opt for open-ended questions: “Can you describe your ideal widget?” rather than “Do you prefer large or small widgets?” With the latter, there’s the assumption that size is the most important factor in choosing a widget, that the group or interview participants have a distinct size preference, and that they all define large and small the same. The former question might reveal that respondents don’t care about the size of their widgets nearly as much as they do about the shape, the color, how easily they can be cleaned, or a host of other factors you might never have considered. From there you can probe deeper with more open-ended questions such as “Can you walk me through how you use your widget?” This type of question “could lead to a need you might not have even thought of,” Sichel says. “That’s what leads to breakthroughs rather than modest change increments.”

Once you’ve gleaned enough insights into your target market’s needs, you can proceed with the quantitative research. This might include questionnaires in which you ask a statistically relevant number of people whether the problems that came up in your qualitative research are indeed problems for them and, if so, how much of a problem and for what percentage and sector of the audience.

Keenan suggests using the results of your research to create what he calls a “problem identification chart” with three columns. The first column lists the problems that your product or service aims to solve; the second is the impact for the potential customers if the problems aren’t solved; the third is what is causing each problem. “You’re not finding out what they need but instead where they are,” he says. Lack agrees: “We’re trying to meet the customer where they’re at, which means letting the consumer mindset lead your every mood.”

Of course, the qualitative and quantitative research combined will also help you better understand your target audience—or more likely, audiences. You’re apt to find that an ideal frozen dinner for parents of young children, say, looks rather different from the ideal frozen dinner for childless consumers, while empty nesters on a budget might have no desire for frozen dinners at all.

That’s why, in addition to knowing an audience’s pain points, you need to have at least some demographic and psychographic information about them. “If you understand your audience, the communities they’re part of, the culture they identify with, the artists they look to, the food they enjoy, those insights are a solid jumping-off point for all the marketing you’ll do to make your product or your brand relevant and desirable to them,” Lack says. “You’ll know what kind of UX or graphic design they’re likely to respond to. You’ll know where to advertise because you’ll have an idea of where they’re hanging out—both digitally and in real life. You’ll know what press to target because you know what they’re reading. You’ll know what influencers to develop partnerships with—people with whom they likely feel familiarity or connection.”

Once you understand the problems each sector of your audience is trying to solve with your product or service, you can move on to identifying and marketing the solutions. “It’s not about pushing your product,” Keenan insists. “It’s about making a recommendation to solve a problem.”

And how does one effectively make a recommendation? By telling a story.

“It’s the solution that’s the answer,” Sichel says, “and because it’s a solution, not a product, that’s where the emotion in the storytelling comes in.” And it’s the storytelling that shows your target market why your offering, not that of your competitors, is the solution to their problem—and why your audience should change their behavior by purchasing your product or service.

Sweet Emotion

Maybe you don’t want to position your brand or offering as a solution. Or perhaps the problem it’s solving is too apparent or too mundane: a supermarket, for instance, is solving the problem of consumers’ lack of food in the house. That’s why supermarket chain Publix sells groceries by selling happiness. “Where shopping is a pleasure” is the brand’s slogan, which it reinforces by ensuring its stores are well lit, well stocked, and well staffed with genuinely friendly workers. Beyond that, its advertisements focus less on the food and more on the people enjoying being together at an occasion that is made even more joyful by the inclusion of food. The product is secondary to the emotion.

“The best way to get someone to change their behavior is through emotion,” says Tim Ito, Cofounder/Principal of digital marketing agency Marketing Nice Guys. The emotions he finds most effective to tap into, particularly for smaller businesses, are love, hate, fear/anxiety, and ambition (“what somebody wants to be”). Similarly, a long-held tenet among copywriters is that the seven most effective emotional drivers are fear, greed, anger, guilt, flattery, exclusivity, and salvation.

In the case of the negative emotions, you’re selling not them, but rather what Ito terms “the antidote.” By addressing prospective customers’ fear of driving children in an unsafe vehicle, for example, Volvo sells security. By speaking to the anger many women feel about the unreal beauty expectations set by media, Dove’s Real Beauty campaign is selling empowerment, inclusivity, and self-esteem.

Keep in mind that this approach needs to be holistic; it’s not a one-and-done problem-solution case study. Publix’s heartwarming commercials and inviting slogan wouldn’t be effective if its stores were shabby and its staff rude. “Brand building for a long-term relationship with your customer should always be the goal,” Lack says. “And with every relationship—even the one between your brand and your customer—there has to be trust, consistency, and some emotional investment. So you need to keep showing up for your customer, as
much as they are for you.”

Lack cites e-tailer Zappos, where she was formerly Director of Content and Partnerships, as an example. “Zappos is all in on excellent customer service. They literally wrote the book on it. They call themselves a customer-service company that just happens to sell shoes and clothes.” And by selling exceptional service first and apparel and footwear second, Zappos sets itself apart from the myriad other purveyors of shoes and clothing while retaining a loyal customer base.

Which brings us to what is arguably the most important aspect of selling your offering and brand as something more than what it appears to be. “You need to understand where you are,” Ito says. “If it’s not authentic, you’re not going to be able to project it.”

What They’re Really Selling: A Few Real-Life Examples

LOOK OPTIC

What they seem to sell: Readers

What they’re really selling: Choices and affordability

How they sell it: “Owning one pair of readers was like owning one pair of shoes and having to wear them every day,” said LOOK OPTIC founder Andrew Leary. So, he set out to provide consumers with the highest-quality readers available, in classic styles and colors for every occasion, priced so you can own multiple pairs. Check out our Brands We Love story on page 10 for more details.

GODIVA

What they seem to sell: Chocolate

What they’re really selling: A well-deserved premium indulgence

How they sell it: When Godiva closed its stand-alone boutiques throughout North America to focus on selling its chocolate via the web and mass retailers, it still wanted to differentiate itself as a luxury choice. So it opted to appeal to its target audience’s need for what chief marketing officer John Galloway called “a little bright spot in their day” with advertising that referenced “celebrations, every day or night.” Godiva also reinforces the brand’s exclusivity with copy emphasizing “magnificent artistry” that describes not only the chocolate, but their beautiful gold packaging as well.

CRAYOLA

What they seem to sell: Craft supplies

What they’re really selling: Creativity and self-expression

How they sell it: You can’t buy crayons or any of Crayola’s other products on its website—its product pages instead direct you to the sites of various retailers. But what you can get on its site are lesson plans, coloring pages, and craft ideas, establishing the brand as a purveyor of inspiration and fun. Crayola backs this up with its annual Creativity Week program, during which it provides even more free resources for educators and parents worldwide, not only from Crayola but also from partners such as publishers HarperCollins and Penguin Random House. Expanding on this, in 2023 the brand launched Crayola Studios to produce films, series, and other entertainment for children. “With the establishment of Crayola Studios, we seek to inspire and nurture the next generation and help them develop lifelong creative mindsets,” Executive Vice President of Marketing Victoria Lozano said during a presentation in Cannes. “I believe Crayola’s unique perspective and its long-standing mission and values present an exciting opportunity for the industry as it searches for and develops stand-out new entertainment content with creative self-expression at its heart.”