Are You Keeping It Simple?

When it comes to marketing, one thing is sure; you will never see your product or service in the same way that one of your consumers will. This is, unfortunately, inevitable.

Pretty much everything you do for your business is a deliberate action, you think about what you're doing and the reasons for it (at least I hope you do).

As a result of this you will look at the elements you offer and consider them. Most of the time you have had to think about them to have them be there in the first place.

But this doesn't mean you are always mindful of how small details can be significant to consumers. For example the background in the picture of the car you're selling may well convey an awful lot of information to a prospective customer either at a conscious or unconscious level.

But the seller, having dutifully cleaned his car is only looking at how smart the vehicle looks, not what's going on around it. If he did consider the background his familiarity with it means he would see it quite differently anyway.

Which of these cars would you want to buy if everything else was equal?

Assuming the red Golf works, it wouldn't have taken very long to drive it to a more scenic backdrop, snap a picture and take it back home. Even just opening the curtains to reflect the usual daytime practice might have been an idea.

When it comes to understanding how prospective customers see your product one of the most important issues is how simple it is to make the purchase.

• How easy is it to understand what's on offer?
• How obvious is it what they have to do?
• How simple is it to choose from any options provided?
• How clear is it what will happen next?

When customers get confused, for example if they are presented with a wide number of choices, they are likely to respond in one of two ways:

1. Defer the decision - meaning that they will quite often either not buy at all or buy from somebody else.
2. Default to establish behaviour - selecting the product that they've always selected before (even if there are aspects of it with which they're unhappy).

Option two is okay if you're an established business with an established customer base, at least it is in the short-term. These customers not likely to be happy about the choices they've made if anything goes wrong subsequently.

So it is well worth taking a moment to check how simple it is to buy from you.

Now at this point, you may well be thinking that the smart thing to do (since you can't look at your own product environment objectivity) is to ask a friend or a customer how easy they find the experience.

Continue to find out why that would be a mistake.…. » 

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