Your Thursday Adult B2B Marketing Tip of the Day - How Your Potential Customer Thinks

For “John Smith” It’s An Issue Of Risk & Confidence

We've been talking about John Smith, your potential customer. Who he is and how he thinks.

There are two factors at work in a prospect's subconscious mind when he's considering doing business with you: confidence and risk. Your job in advertising is to raise confidence and lower risk. If you successfully do that, you'll sew up all the business. So let's talk first about confidence. The problem is that in today's marketplace, people are more jaded, skeptical, and weary. Weary of getting ripped off. Jaded from bad service. Skeptical of offers that sound too good to be true. In short, people are generally in a defensive buying position.

As a result, the tendency is to either do nothing (remember your third kind of competitor, the dreaded inertia?) or to stick with their current supplier - even if the relationship isn't all that great. People figure it's safer to stay in a so-so relationship than test the waters of finding a new company to do business with.

You can probably mentally validate this in your own personal buying habits. Have you ever gotten fed up with a company you do business with, gone to the yellow pages and called around looking for someone better, then frustrated and exhausted, meekly returned to the original culprit because of a perceived lack of better options? Of course you have. We all have. You know by now the reason for this is the confidence gap. The customer doesn't have any ability to make any distinction whether any of the options are any better or worse or different than any of the others. There are a lot of different reasons for this - probably the biggest is the dramatically increased number of choices that people have.

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