To bosses: Your product is great, but why don’t users buy it?

Stimulating consumers' pain points has always been a difficult point in product and community operations. This article details how to stimulate consumers' pain points and attract customers' attention and interest. I hope it will be helpful to you.

Have you ever been confused like this: you have tried your best to promote your product, but consumers just ignore it?

You try to please consumers, but they remain indifferent.

You try your best to attract customers' attention and interest, but in the end you are just being self-indulgent;

These problems ultimately come down to the fact that the products, activities, services, etc. that you provide to consumers do not trigger their dopamine (pleasure points) or stimulate their pain points .

So why would consumers spend hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of dollars to buy your product? What needs does your product solve for consumers?

There is such an example in Mr. Yu Jian’s book “Insight”——

A fast food chain wanted to increase sales of its milkshake products, so it recruited some consumers for focus groups and asked them questions.

Should our milkshakes be thicker or thinner?

Should there be more or less chocolate in the milkshake?

Should our milkshakes be cheaper or more filling?

What other ways would make you more satisfied with our products?

The brand then improved its product based on customer feedback, but sales did not change significantly.

At the same time, another group of insight personnel began to intervene in the project. They stayed in a store for 18 hours and carefully observed the customers who bought milkshakes. They recorded the time of each purchase; recorded what they bought at the same time; paid attention to whether these customers came alone or in groups; whether they ate in the store or took away... The results showed that nearly half of the milkshakes were sold in the early morning, and customers usually only bought one milkshake, and most of them were taken away.

Following this clue, the researchers interviewed customers who bought milkshakes in the early morning, and the answer they got was that they were facing a long drive and needed to eat something to pass the time.

These things need to meet multiple needs - they are not hungry, but if they don't eat something at this time, they will easily feel hungry after 10 o'clock in the morning; they are in a hurry and most of the time they can only free one hand; if they choose other foods at this time, such as biscuits, it is easy to make the car and clothes full of crumbs; sometimes they will choose bananas, but often they will quickly fall into boredom because they eat too fast.

Finally, these customers discovered that a thick milkshake and a thin straw were the perfect "solution" at this time.

In this example, we can see that when the milkshake company discovered the new consumption scenario of "killing time in the car", they were able to modify their products according to the needs of consumers in the scenario - the milkshake was thicker and the straw was thinner, and the corresponding packaging, pricing, and promotion activities were also a natural result. It is better to give targeted things than to give everything.

Through this case, let us summarize and extend how to discover the hidden real needs of consumers?

1. "Spy" on users and restore the usage process and details

Real-life testing and peeping are two great ways to gain low-cost insights into consumers.

What is voyeurism? It means entering the real life of consumers, observing their lives, and recording when, where, and in what scenarios they use our products?

What is the entire process and procedure of use, and what do users think when using it?

Similar to the example above, Shi Yuzhu summarized the planning process of Melatonin in his book "Shi Yuzhu, My Marketing Experience" as follows:

“Before marketing, you must thoroughly understand the needs of your users. This need is a psychological need, not a superficial need. It takes some effort to discover this need.”

"For example, the users of Melatonin at that time were middle-aged and elderly people. In order to fully understand their psychological consumption needs, I went to the park to chat with them. It turned out that they wanted this product, but they were reluctant to spend money to buy it. They expected their children to buy it for them. In this way, the target of my advertising was not them, but their children. Our advertisements should be shown to the children who are willing to spend money. And the children just need to buy some gifts for their parents when they go home to visit them. So "Give Melatonin as a gift" came into being."

Similarly, the Banmu Huatian brand, a student of our offline growth-igniting course, has an internal organization called the Customer Group Product Line . What is this department mainly responsible for? The first is to study the market, and the second is to study customers. The brand basically holds nearly a hundred large and small customer interviews every year.

Half Acre Flower Field discovered a problem: sometimes when you call a customer, what the customer tells you may not be the truth, or may not be what she thinks. So brands now have a way to conduct customer research, which is to go into some customers' homes, without them having to tell you, and go to their bathrooms to see what products they use and why they choose these products. At this time, the brand will receive the most authentic feedback from customers, including the products they throw in the trash or put in the corner, which can fully present a customer's usage scenario.

Banmu Huatian has been using this type of research method for about three years, which is equivalent to going to the front line and getting in front of users.

Among the many domestic brands I know of, Ban Mu Hua Tian is the only one that goes into customers’ homes to conduct research. It is very forward-looking and gives users a real feeling. The brand truly understands their needs.

2. Think from others’ perspective

Empathy means that when developing products, you should consider consumers as your own family.

For example, if you take your two-year-old child to eat noodles, and a bowl of concentrated broth is served, which is actually something that only needs to be boiled and soaked in boiling water to produce its flavor, would you dare to give this kind of soup to your two-year-old child?

I believe that no one will do that, so when developing products, no one will do such a thing, but will start from the consumer's perspective.

Here I would like to share two more cases with you.

One is a light meal replacement brand I collaborated with called Pastoralism.

This brand started operating an online Tmall store when it was first launched, and entered the meal replacement field with a popular real whole wheat bread. In less than a year, it achieved the impressive result of being ranked first in sales in the whole wheat bread category on Tmall, with monthly revenue exceeding 20 million. In 2020, the total network revenue on Double 11 was nearly 30 million, with whole wheat bread alone accounting for 70% of sales.

How does pastoralism achieve this?

As an Internet brand, in the era of a hundred schools of thought, if you don't catch up with the springboard of the bonus, you will undoubtedly be much lower. But this also promotes the rise of a brand, which must move forward step by step and work hard on products.

With the advent of the health trend, many consumers who buy whole wheat bread are attracted by concepts such as "fullness", "oil-free and sugar-free", "fat reduction" and "health", but many people do not know that real whole wheat bread does not contain wheat flour and must be 100% whole wheat.

The products in the domestic whole wheat bread market can be roughly divided into two categories: one is "fake whole wheat bread" which is labeled as "whole wheat bread" but the ingredients list is mainly wheat flour; the other is genuine whole wheat bread, but it tastes sour and rough, and young people don't like its taste.

Relying on innovations in product research and development and production technology, Pastoralism has launched a series of real whole wheat breads that suit the individual tastes of young people. The price-performance ratio is higher than many whole wheat breads on the market, and it has solved the problem of the rough and sour taste of traditional whole wheat bread, breaking the conventional taste of existing whole wheat bread on the market, achieving a balance between deliciousness and low calories, and redefining whole wheat bread.

A good product is one that consumers can perceive and develop faith in the brand or the urge to repurchase . Currently on major social platforms, there are countless positive reviews from consumers who have spontaneously recommended Pastoral Whole Wheat Bread.

After quickly opening up the market with its core product, whole wheat bread, Pastoralism further extended the product's flavors vertically and expanded its product categories horizontally, developing a series of products including whole wheat and multi-grain biscuits and whole wheat noodles.

The success of Pastoralism is that it has redefined consumers' perception and imagination of whole wheat bread through multi-level innovation in categories and products, bringing the beautiful things of "good-looking, delicious, healthy and filling" to more consumers.

The other one is Kangaroo Mom, a brand that students of our offline growth-igniting courses admire. When I visited this brand, I was truly moved when the founder introduced the product design concept of “pregnancy curves” to me.

The bottle designs of the pregnancy and postpartum skin care products presented by this brand are basically in the shape of a pregnant belly. From the perspective of a pregnant mother, the name, category and association can be clearly seen at a glance.

I have always believed that the way a good product conveys its values ​​is to focus on details and express them through small ideas, behaviors, and concepts. Only in this way can it impress consumers and encourage them to spread the word.

Steve Jobs once said, “Our goal is not to sell to the most people, but to make our customers love our products.”

The essence of being a consumer brand is not to sell products, but to serve the people you love and make them love you. The so-called background of business is humanity. When you care about users and create value, everything will happen naturally. The growth of product sales and GMV is just a wonderful added value.

3. Joint user creation

In today's communication environment, the shift in discourse power has resulted in today's users being more willing to participate rather than simply being reached passively, compared to the past when users passively sat in front of the screen.

The external force that lifts the bottom is determined by "sense of value".

The so-called "sense of value" is "visible value". The "value" here can be the input of material labor or the input of spiritual labor.

"Visible" means that your labor can be visualized directly. In particular, the more extra energy and time consumers put into the process of participation, the stronger the sense of ritual, the higher the expectations, and the stronger the sense of value and happiness brought by the release of emotions and desires.

The most typical example is Hua Xizi, which is user-demand-oriented and conducts innovative research and development of new products to meet the ultimate needs of consumers.

Huaxizi’s users have a special name - "Huaban", which means "growing up with Huaxizi". Users are partners and confidants of the brand, rather than fans.

On the one hand, Huaxizi has created a VOC customer voice system to collect consumer comments on e-commerce platforms, interactions on social platforms, and big data from the user experience official app backend. Through natural language processing (NLP) technology, it continuously tracks consumers' opinions and feedback at various ports in real time to help improve products and services. Currently, it has collected tens of millions of user voices and helped multiple products to achieve upgrades and iterations.

For example, Huaxizi eyebrow pencil has been upgraded to the 8th generation in 4 years; Huaxizi loose powder has had its formula upgraded more than 40 times in the 3 years since it was launched on the market, most of which were shelved, and only the upgraded 3 generations were truly launched on the market.

On the other hand, Huaxizi has started co-creating projects with users since 2017, inviting users to become product experience officers, participate in the evaluation of each product and provide feedback on their real usage experience.

It is precisely because of the user co-creation mechanism that the real needs of users can be conveyed in a timely manner, which enables Huaxizi to ensure product quality and allow product research and development to take into account both "slow work and careful polishing" and "rapid iteration."

Behind the spread of the sense of participation is "trust endorsement", which is the evolution of weak user relationships into strong user relationships with better trust.

If consumers’ values ​​and attitudes toward a brand converge or even recognize it during the interaction, it will be much easier to convert the brand’s sales. When consumers participate, their attention will be focused on content with high recognition, which is also a concrete manifestation of value recognition.

The above is my interpretation of how to gain insight into consumers’ hidden real needs. I hope it will be inspiring to you. Please give me a like and show your support.

Author: Sister Mulan

Source public account: Mulanjie (ID: mulanjie-)