Shane Parrish shares the root of good marketing and brand building (though I think he was just talking about behavior change)
If you want to understand someone, figure out the narrative they tell themselves about themself.
If you want to change your behavior, change your narrative. If you want to change someone else’s behavior, offer them a more compelling narrative they can tell themselves.
Where the Venn diagram overlaps is where the magic happens.
An HBR article shares the findings of an ecommerce pricing study undertaken using A/B testing.
One finding:
Among the 54% price tests with a non-control winner, we found that 59% of winning price points were lower than the control price. This means that e-commerce retailers commonly overprice their products and, thus, leave some profitable demand uncaptured.
To which shoppers responded
Availability trumps loyalty.
From David Gottlieb on the Behind the Numbers podcast:
In our specific primary research, we find that 40% of shoppers will brand switch when they can’t find the item they’re looking for.
But if you’re buying a consumer good like a soup or a mac and cheese or a home cleaning product, people are brand loyal to a point, but if they need something for a recipe or to complete their shopping mission, they’re probably not going to go home empty-handed.
That’s a real challenge for brands because brand loyalty is built slowly over time and it can erode very quickly if somebody is forced to try a competitive product, you’re giving them an opportunity that you don’t want them to have essentially as a loyal brand shopper.
The art of the offer from Kay Allison via Rusty Blazenhoff:
How to craft an offer. And, as it turns out, an offer isn’t just telling people what you do. No, no. As I’ve learned, people don’t buy what you do. They buy the promise of transformation.
a great offer doesn’t just describe. It shows you the outcome. It paints a picture of what life looks like after you say yes.
People don’t buy a widget, they buy an emotion.
They buy their way to an aspirational state.
They buy a future in which they’re a different version of themselves than the one of now.