"But how does server virtualization make you feel?"
Sounds like an odd question to pose to a Chief Technology Officer, but it might be appropriate. every person outside of congress has human emotions. Numerous studies show that promotions spellbinding purely to emotions sell best than those that pry only on intellect. Exploiting common target buyer emotions is a basic marketing tactic.
Which is oddly missing from most B2B marketing.
High tech entrepreneurs rarely add qualitative explore to their task list. Having met with early adopters, they mistakenly assume they understand everything about their entire market. The motivations of early adopters are as distinct from the broad shop as are Hillary and Bill Clinton's motivations toward Monica Lewinsky. Start-up founders may accidentally motion to one or other emotional motivation of early adopters, but rarely do they take time to inspect the motivations of each buyer genotype within their top three shop segments.
One tool in qualitative shop explore is called "laddering", which attempts to guide an interviewee through the hierarchy of motivations, from the most basic functional features through the respondent's most personal emotive desire. Laddering is useful since request population about their feelings first can furnish bizarre and misleading responses. Thus it is best to begin from the foundation of the buyer/vendor relationship - the features offered by the stock - and gradually ascend the ladder of motivations.
(One fine example of doing it the other way is when researching new features for products. Herein you inspect what population love, hate and want in order to inspect what the shop is not providing. We did this for a B2B client by request interviewees "What do you hate about your job" in order to inspect what could be fixed. We got some noteworthy good and mightily strong responses.)
The more common ground-up arrival involves getting interviewees to elaborate what stock features are important, what are the thinkable, functional outcomes (benefits), why these outcomes are foremost (higher order benefits), and how achieving this makes them feel. The laddering process eliminates unsupervised thinking, and leads the respondent through the levels of saying what they know (basic features and benefits) into discovery of what they don't commonly contend (personal aspirations or organizational benefits) and their own feelings.
Appealing to their feelings is what most B2B clubs fail to do.
Apple gets this. iPods were sold using happy dancing silhouettes which spoke directly to the buyers' emotional gratification of the joy of music (and to the age group most likely to achieve spontaneous dance moves in public). Emotional drivers apply to firm too. The slogan "Nobody ever got fired for buying Ibm" was an motion to every Cio's fear of technological failure and involuntary unemployment.
Like it or loath it, you have to make qualitative explore part of your marketing strategy. Failing to identify and echo the emotional drivers of buyers leads to tiny sales, to population who accept original features as sufficient, and thus would just as soon buy from your competitors.
watch this video inspiring Laddering - Qualitative explore in B2B Marketing watch this video
No comments:
Post a Comment