⚠ Copywriter: You’re NOT selling what the customer is buying
“The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it's selling him.”
⚠ Copywriter: You’re NOT selling what the customer is buying
When I started writing copy – back in 2006 – the following statement would’ve felt pretty foreign:
“The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it's selling him.”
I would’ve wracked my brains, trying to work out what it meant. I may have even completely dismissed it: What is this deliberately vague nonsense?
That’s because I’d never heard of Peter Drucker, the famous management consultant and Harvard Business School professor who’d said it. And I’d never come across the jobs to be done (JTBD) approach to marketing – something that now sits at the heart of my own copywriting philosophy.
We’re going to kick off this copywriting series by digging into this counterintuitive statement - and boldly trying to understand the most fundamental thing:
What exactly should you be writing?
Getting the job done
JTBD was first developed in the 1980s by trailblazer Tony Ulwick, whose company Strategyn found a lot of success using the approach. JTBD focuses on the customer, not the product. It zeroes in on their goals and jobs, not functions and features. And it looks at alternative solutions, not just direct competitors.
Ulwick’s concept was based on the work of several clever people, including Drucker and another visionary – Theodore Levitt, the author of Marketing Mode (1969) before being promoted by Clay Christensen and Michael E. Raynor, who explored the concept in the Innovator’s Solution (2003).
You can think about it like this:
The customer is not buying a plane ticket, they’re investing in networking opportunities
They’re not buying an English language course, they’re paying for a better career
They’re not buying a Spa day, they’re purchasing peace of mind
Top tip: It might mean that your product is competing in many different categories - not just with other like-for-like brands. If someone wants to have fun with friends, they can go to the cinema, buy a games console, or head to a restaurant.
Ulwick’s concept was based on the work of several clever people, including Drucker and another visionary – Theodore Levitt, the author of Marketing Mode (1969) before being promoted by Clay Christensen and Michael E. Raynor, who explored the concept in the Innovator’s Solution (2003).
So it’s got some chops – and is well worth considering as a way to approach your copywriting career.
Getting your ears dirty
The question is: How do you find out what job your audience is trying to get done?
You’ve got to start by listening to your current customers and finding out their goals, dreams, needs, challenges, obstacles…and the alternative solutions they would consider. It’s important to never assume you know why someone buys a product, or purchase what you’re selling. Assumptions form the basis of bad and misinformed writing.
You have several ways to find things out.
Third-party research (reports, white papers, survey results, case studies, social listening) might send you in the right direction
Focus groups, interviews, one-to-one chats can all uncover little nuggets of information that help your words truly resonate with your audience.
Surveys can gather more accurate (and statistically relevant) information from a wider selection of your audience.
Finally, you can trawl through reviews, forums and customer service tickets to see what people are saying, doing or asking about.
Top tip: You might not be tasked to run surveys, interview people or do market research yourself. But you can advocate for it, ask for it, beg for it… after all, you can’t be very effective without it.
Then what, huh?
Once you know what makes the buyers tick, you know what they really want to achieve. You can stop looking at the fancy buttons on the clever gadget you’re selling and start thinking about what it really does for people.
Warning, be sure to ask about the negative aspects, because if your copy can help potential buyers see past them, it will be all the more effective:
What’s the hardest thing about X?
What stops you from buying X?
What’s the worst thing about using X?
If you could change X to make it better for you, how would you do it?
Also, ask them about the alternatives:
What have you bought to solve this problem in the past?
What did or didn’t you like about it?
What makes you choose this alternative instead?
Top tip: If you're in the room, record it. If you’re not in the room, ask for transcripts or recordings.
Why?
Because you’ll hear the voice of the customer. You’ll hear the words they use to describe their experience. You can lift adjectives and place them in your copy. You can make your words sound like your customer’s buddy. This is how you can add cheese to your broccoli - or rather, how you turn your copy into a bonafide sales machine.
What’s the takeaway here?
We want to move away from product-orientated copy and towards market-orientated copy.
Product-led writing focuses only on what your device does, how it works, the features it has and the outcomes it achieves. It can be effective, but it only works in the instances where a person already understands exactly what they need and why.
Market-led writing jumps off with what people want. It gets them excited about the possibilities, it answers their questions and it shows them how they’ll benefit. It’s an ice cream -so sell them on the experience, not the ingredients.
“People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.”
— Theodore Levitt, Harvard Business School
Keep it snappy,
George
Love the advice of "....sell them on the experience, not the ingredients" and of course any post that mentions a unicorn.