Why do customers buy from you?

This is a question I ask a lot. I meet many executives, investors and board members and one of the questions they always ask me is “how can we accelerate growth?” and my response is “why do customers buy from you”?

If you don’t, truly and certainly, understand why a customer buys your product/solution over alternative solutions (or no solution) you can not even begin the journey of scaling and growing your business with any predictability and consistency.

When pressed further on my question, many executives tell me about how customers love the great service they provide, or there is a certain feature or features of their product they cannot live without, or we have incredible efficiency in acquisition and activation of our sales funnel, or we are the standard in that industry.

With all due respect, none of these are why customers buy from you.

What customers buy from you is what their life looks like afterward, what they want to become as it relates to your products and services.

And what they buy from you. . . they cannot obtain from another . . . is the real reason they do business with you.

So, the exercise is to determine what future state they are aspiring and what they cannot buy from another. And to do that you need to look way beyond features and functionality. You need to understand the meaningful impact your brand has on the lives of your customers.

We could get philosophical and start going through Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and this has some relevance but I tend to keep it simple. My approach is to determine how a product enables a customer to survive and thrive.

There are a number of books in my “library” that I read and re-read on a regular basis and after reading “Building a Story Brand” for the nth time, I was reminded that the key to a company’s message is to be about something that helps the customer survive and to do so in a way that they can understand without burning too many calories.

This should be explicitly linked to your company’s (or brand’s) core purpose.

Airbnb’s customers don’t buy short term rental accommodation but rather the sense of living like a local anywhere in the world.

Nike customers don’t buy shoes or clothing but rather the ability to feel like athletes who are striving to perform at their best.

And Apple customers don’t buy computers or phones but rather the feeling of thinking and seeing the world differently then the masses.

A CEO I know and admire recently sent me an article that does a great job of demonstrating how to build a great brand around what customers buy. This article explains that great brands talk about people and what impact the brand has on their lives, not products and the features of those products.

Why do customers buy from you? What does their life look like after they have purchased a product from you?

Thanks for reading. I’m John McAuliffe and I help companies accelerate growth more consistently and with greater predictability using repeatable processes.