Top 3 Ways to Grow Your Business - Value, Vanity, and Necessity
We’re in it deep. The bad times of the economy that is. Unemployment is up, job layoffs are becoming more and more of a common headline, and percentages are going down like a big boulder dropped into the water when it comes to corporate earnings. On every news channel all we here about are negative headlines of doom on the horizon as if America along with the world will never survive this economic melt down.
The people running the news channels want to tell you as a business there is no hope. I say tell them to shut up because what I’m going to share will open your eyes up as a business owner. What most business owners do not realize is that even though during the great depression unemployment was up and economy was looking like it was dead, there was a rise of millionaires. In fact so much so that during the great depression more millionaires came out of that era than any other era before and after that. Yes you heard me correctly! When all hell broke loose and the economy looked like it was dying there was a huge growth of people who were prospering.
How come this was happening? Value, vanity, and necessity.
Value
Businesses that sold products or services at a value price point is what kept them alive. The challenge is that because a business is selling based on value it needs to be based on quantity or very low cost. An average small business will have a challenge competing in this market, especially against the likes of Walmart. Companies like this have buying power and can negotiate lower price points due to the massive amounts of customers.
If you still feel that value is the way to build your business then you’ll need to look for ways to offer a lower cost item. You can do this through the use of outsourcing, doing it yourself, or negotiating lower prices from your vendors. Each of these areas have their own challenges and benefits. I’ll have to write a follow up post on the three challenges and benefits of outsourcing, doing it yourself, or negotiating lower price points.
Vanity
Unless your like me and enjoy watching the History Channel you probably wouldn’t have ran across this information. During the great depression there was a particular company that rose to the top out of no where. Can you guess that company? Maidenform. Women where buying bras left and right because it met an emotional need. Even though times were tough people still wanted to feel good about themselves. This touches on a really important point that any smart business really needs to pay attention to. People do not buy based on features, widgets, or even price point as much as they buy based on an emotional need. Everything that people buy is based on a perceived value. If a user perceives they need it then value is associated to it. I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s slow this roll down a bit and get back to vanity.
Vanity products are cosmetics, cologne, lingerie, some clothes, and anything that appeals to making someone feel or look good. Basically vanity products are products that appeal to an emotional need. They are products that speak to the core of someone in that they make them feel better about themselves. There is the key, themselves.
Necessity
Alright, here’s where the real juicy information comes. Necessity. This subjects comes in many shapes and forms. On the surface level necessity products or services are those that are needed for the perseverance of life. Food, water, oil, electricity, etc. Anything that keeps a home going or a business running would be considered necessity on the surface level. The word of the day on this street here is “surface level”. I’ll explain that in a minute, but first let’s back up to the surface level necessity.
Every market has their own necessities. Where one company sees Internet access as a luxury the others see it as a necessity. For example, if I’m a media and marketing company, then having computers with various types of software are needed along with my good friend the Internet. In contrast a florist may not need software but what they will need flowers. Both are great examples of necessity.
Every business will need to figure out what niche markets see their service as a “surface level” necessity and begin marketing to them aggressively.
Onto the Juicy Points of Necessity
Here’s where a good marketing firm (such as Veloce Media the top marketing company) play an important role. People make buying decissions off of perceived emotional need. The buying decission that a customer or client makes is done within the first 30 seconds. Subconsciously a person has made up their mind and either identified or rejected you. The rest of the conversation and decission making process is their conscious mind making logical points of why their subconscious mind made that decission in the first place. This where most sales professionals miss it. They get so caught up on the features, values, and the objections that they don’t take the time to uncover the emotional decission that was made. Deep stuff.
Where this becomes beneficial for you as a business is to understand how to build the emotional need behind your product or service. I can’t stress this enough, necessity is based upon perceived need. The more someone perceives they need it the more it becomes a necessity. The way you begin building the perceived necessity is by throwing out talk about features and begin looking into solutions. Find out what problems people have, dig deep into that problem. Once you have identified that problem find the emotional need behind it and show how your product will meet that emotional need in the form of a solution. The more you communicate that principle to your target audience the more it will become a place of necessity in their life.
Tags: Branding, branding 101
This entry was posted on Friday, November 21st, 2008 at 10:31 am and is filed under Business Growth, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
