Product or service – is it really the most important thing?
Let me tell you a story.

 

“I feel like I should add a special stitch to it to justify the price”

– said my client about her new fashion line piece.

In her head, if it was pricey, it needed to have something SPECIAL.

A magic element nothing else has, so people pay more for it.

She was stuck trying to find a way to earn what she knew was fair, position her brand in the right place in the market while also feeling it’s fair for the customer.

We’ve all been there, haven’t we?

So I asked her a few questions and she had this realization:

“Perception is everything. While quality products are important, its the perceived experience the customer believes she or he will have when purchasing your product. Sell the experience, not the product.”

 

If you were to launch your new product or service, let’s say 100 years ago, you’d just created something people really needed.

You wouldn’t need to market it much, simply create a great product, great service and people will find you. They were actively looking for something you created anyway. It fulfilled their honest need. They didn’t have much choice either, because there were literally only a few other people offering it, if at all.

Today, it’s a different story.

Today, we’ve got everything we need easily accessible and way too much choice. If you think about it, how many things you buy do you actually need?

Probably just a few.

Nowadays, we buy things to fill up our wants.

We want to look great and feel good so we buy cosmetics.
We want to comfortably move about so we buy cars.
We want to show off our personal style, so we buy clothes.
We want to feel pampered and taken care of, so we go to a beautician or get a massage.

All of those things are wants. You could easily live without them, couldn’t you? If you really needed to? I know you could!

It’s a hard pill to swallow, but so could your customers and clients live without your product or service.

Knowing that, how do we make them WANT them?

This is exactly why we create brands.

Branding really is the collective opinion and feeling your audience has about you and your business.

So to make people really want whatever you offer, you need to create a brand that they want to experience. A brand that makes them feel the way they want to feel.

A brand that says something about them that they are proud of. You need to create a brand experience so perfectly suited to their wants, that it’s irresistible to them.

That’s how you become the only choice in your industry.
That’s how you become a memorable brand that’s worth sharing with their friends or even brag about.
That’s how you create a brand community people are proud to belong to.

Branding, therefore, is the way you show up for your customers.

It’s all that creates this gut feeling we were talking about earlier.

It’s a number of things, like your brand personality, your mission and vision, your values, your voice, marketing strategy, brand theme, visuals, products and offers, brand culture and more.

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So instead of trying to add MORE into your products or offer, make your brand irresistible to the RIGHT people.

People buy the experience, NOT the product. They buy into a story, a community, a feeling. They make a statement.

Make it a movement. Something they want to be a part of. Something they want to brag about to their friends.

Them purchasing from you says more about them than it does about your brand.

That’s the whole art of brand positioning (have you noticed I’m kind of obsessed with it?)

 

You’re NOT going to get it through a new logo or website design though. You’re going to do it by intentionally creating a smart influence strategy to figure out WHAT you want to say and then finding the right visuals and words to communicate that.

Because you know what?

Design is just a language. First, you need to know what to say.

Ready to elevate your brand to influential, powerful and irresistible?