Biz Tips: What If Marketing Was Honest?
GROWTH:
What If Marketing Was Honest?
The truth can hurt your revenues, but here’s why it’s worth it.
Did you ever work in a retail store and tried to sell expensive running shoes to customers?
I did and I vividly remember a woman walking in, around 30 years old, overweight and lost within the variety of our running shoes collection. I walked up to her and within a few minutes, it was clear, that she was at the very beginning of her running career and that she was externally motivated by her doctor.
When she asked me if I could help her pick out a shoe my response was:
https://medium.com/media/8305213ee30060542fea643b6ac92424/href
I explained to her why I would not advise her to buy an expensive running shoe and why the retailer next store would have way cheaper shoes, that would do the job just fine.
Yeah, I actively convinced her to go to our competitor.
It just felt wrong to me, to sell her a 135,00€ shoe, when it was not even clear if she would stick to running and that for the first months she would basically just be walking to get somewhat in shape. As you can imagine my supervisor was not too thrilled with my sells strategy.
Thus making it the perfect happy ending, if a few months later she’d walked in again, fitter than before, thanking me for my advice and buying two pairs of shoes, running gear and protein bars. Well, I never saw her again. Which either means, that she was completely satisfied with the cheaper choice or that she’d never become a runner.
Now, why is that worth it?
It’s easy to forget how you want to be treated as a customer, when you are thinking about how to pay the bills, your employees, the rent and so on. Your customers instantly become these monsters, that just want the highest quality for the cheapest price and don’t care about your business survives.
But what if your customers actually just want good service, a realistic expectation of what they will get from you and be treated as more than just a walking wallet? How would that look like?
Tell them what you can’t do
Don’t lie to your customers and tell them, that you can do everything they ask of you. Volkswagen, for example, made no secret out of it, that their new Beetle was a small car and it became one of their best selling campaigns with slogans like “Think small”.
If you put in the effort to set realistic expectations and honestly say, what your product or service can and can’t do, you will end up with customers, that appreciate your honesty, discount your issues and praise you for the solutions that you provide and if the potential customer decides to leave, because you are not the right solution, then you’ll still leave a good impression on them.
If you lie and it goes wrong you’ll face way bigger problems and a bigger backslash because anger leads to revenge and a higher motivation to share the bad experience. Don’t be that weight loss program, that sets unrealistic expectations.