The Nature of Fear

According to Ledoux, fear is associated with emotional events for which we can identify a specific threat. The semantic difference between both terms may appear pointless until you realize that anxiety is more diffuse and more permanent than fear, while fear is more precise and typically more imminent than anxiety. Ledoux argues: “To experience fear is to know that YOU are in a dangerous situation, and to experience anxiety is to worry about whether future threats may harm YOU” [137].

The Nature of Pains

We understand that in most cases, it is very difficult if not awkward, to discuss anxiety and fears with your customers directly. When we conduct a neuromarketing experiment, we can assess the level of arousal and fear that people may experience watching an ad without requiring conscious feedback. However, for many of SalesBrain's clients, identifying the neurophysiological basis of fears associated with the purchase of a product or a solution is both costly and challenging to execute. On the other hand, engaging in PAIN dialogues that can specifically focus on what people consider their biggest frustrations associated with the purchase of a solution is relatively easy to do.

Diagnosing the top pains is a critical step because it will later help you select a few benefits of your value proposition that can directly eliminate the top sources of frustrations. It is like putting the dozens of reasons why customers should buy from you through a strainer. Only those that offer a direct, unique, and credible solution to the top pains should stay in the strainer!

Often, pains are simply correlated to complaints, pet peeves, or grievances that customers have once they have purchased or used a product or a solution. When you sell something new, pains can predict future complaints. Here is some valuable data to help you further understand the power of diagnosing the top pains to increase customer satisfaction [138].

• Sixty‐six percent of customers switch to another brand because of receiving poor service.
• Fifty‐eight percent will never use a company again after they experience a negative experience.
• Forty‐eight percent of customers with negative experiences will tell ten people or more, whereas good experiences are shared with five or fewer.

These data points stress something obvious: we are more affected by negative customer experiences events than we are by positive ones. This is why we tend to spend more time sharing our customer nightmares than we do sharing our pleasant experiences.

The Nature of Needs

Psychologists investigating how personality traits explain and predict our behavior popularized the term needs. Needs typically describe what we seek to acquire or do to protect and enhance our lives. The field of personality studies has debated for decades the psychological (and most recently, the neurophysiological) basis of our needs or, more simply, what drives us on a day‐to‐day basis. For our discussion, though, let's review one of the most important models explaining the importance and usefulness of having needs: the Maslow Theory [139].

The Maslow Theory. Abraham Maslow [140] had a rather optimistic view of human nature. He believed that Freud had identified “the sick half of psychology” (p. 5) and suggested that his own model would provide “the healthy half” (p. 5). His view of motivation was dualistic. He believed we have two types of motives: deficiency motives and growth motives. Deficiency motives are common to all people and address physiological and emotional needs such as hunger, safety, love, and esteem from others. Growth motives are specific to some individuals and explain the unselfish pursuit of knowledge or love we can provide to others. He proposed that humans must, in fact, satisfy some basic needs before they satisfy higher needs like self‐actualization. His famous ladder of human needs (Figure 5.2), known as “Maslow's hierarchy of needs,” shows physiological needs at the bottom, followed by safety needs, belongingness and love needs, esteem needs, and self‐actualization.

Moreover, Maslow believed that human needs vary with age and map our personal development stages as illustrated by the graph in Figure 5.3.

Clearly, the primal brain is implicated in the pursuit of the first three needs of the pyramid, whereas the last two require more influence from the rational brain. At a deeper level, though, the theory of needs proposed by Maslow is a theory of human motivation. To that extent, because buying a product or solution requires motivation, Maslow's model is both relevant and important to understand. However, the model does not integrate the complex routine of neural processes that trigger the expression of all basic needs. Additionally, the model posits that human development follows a well‐planned progression of sequential and logical psychological stages, as if they were like rungs on a ladder. Obviously, this is simplistic and is no longer supported by today's understanding of developmental psychology. To conclude, asking consumers what they need is not enough to predict their behavior. This is why marketers have relied on measuring another decision driver to understand consumer behavior: the nature of our wants.

The Nature of Wants

The nature of our wants points directly to the consumerism movement and the well‐accepted idea that our wants are insatiable. There is, again, a subtle difference between needs and wants. Wants articulate desires that can go beyond what we would consider basic needs. Most researchers on the subject argue that wants are outcomes that make us more influential or more powerful, like money, power, or public attention [141]. Frankly, the theoretical discussion on the subject has been blurry for decades because it has relied for too long on what people are willing to say they want. Fortunately, recent studies coming from the field of neuromarketing and neuroeconomics have provided a more credible theoretical framework to understand our wants.

In his book Introduction to Consumer Neuroscience, Thomas Ramsoy presents his theory for the neurophysiological basis of our wants. He claims that “wanting” is mediated by a brain structure called the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), a brain structure we have discussed several times already in this book when we discussed the emotional stimulus. It is tucked deep in the primal brain. Ramzoy suggests that “wanting is the unconscious approach and avoidance evaluation related to items, organisms, and events.” He uses a well‐known study from Knutson and colleagues to support his theory [41]. We already cited this source, but to remind you, Knutson claimed that he could predict what people “want” before they decide by looking at the surge of blood flow to their nucleus accumbens. Unfortunately, although we have a better understanding of which areas of the brain predict the want signal, there is still no reliable scale to collect people's self‐reported evaluation of what they want. In other words, unless you put people in a fMRI, your ability to measure what people want is very difficult and mostly unreliable. This is why we suggest that collecting pain data is easier and more predictive of purchasing behavior.

The Nature of Likes

The concept of liking may be less ambiguous than the concept of want. After all, we can usually report whether we like something or not. Liking is typically captured by asking people to rate something, which is a way of providing a grade or a numerical assessment of how much you enjoyed a product or an experience. As such, you would think that measures that come from liking or rating are more reliable than measures of what we want. Think again! A famous study conducted by Gregory Berns on the popularity of songs revealed that the liking data was not predictive of the neural response [142]. For instance, the data collected from the nucleus accumbens activity, which also correlates with what people choose (or buy), did not correlate with the liking data. Even Facebook considered the importance of going beyond collecting like data by adding emoticons a few years ago. This provides the social media company more emotional granularity that their data scientists can use to analyze the sentiment expressed by millions of users.

Indentifying the Top Pains

We have conducted thousands of surveys and interviews of which the sole purpose was to unveil customers' top pains. Although the products and services for which we did these interviews vary greatly, from fMRI equipment to cosmetic products, we have consistently been able to categorize pain insights in three categories.

The Three Sources of Pain. Pain always falls into three main categories: financial, strategic, or personal.

1. Financial pain pertains to economic factors such as the loss of revenue, low profitability, or bad ROI. Financial pain is typically highly visible and easy to measure.
2. Strategic pain includes issues that affect key business risks that can compromise the development, manufacturing, marketing, or delivery of products and services. Typical types of strategic pains are poor product quality, production inefficiencies, high customer complaints, and poor brand recognition. Strategic pain is not always as visible as financial pain and cannot always be easily measured.
3. Personal pain is made up of the negative feelings and emotions affecting those who are involved in the buying decisions. Examples include elevated levels of stress, job insecurity, or working longer hours.

Table 5.1 should help you quickly understand how to recognize and label the pains you can diagnose.

Conducting Pain Dialogues

There is an effective way to identify the most critical pains. Just create an intimate dialogue with your top customers. Customers, not prospects, are the best source for this crucial information. Customers have had the benefit of an intimate relationship with your value proposition already, so they can share a unique perspective on what transformation it brought to their lives by your solution. Simply ask them the following questions and be prepared to practice deep listening!

1. What were some of the top challenges, hurdles, or risks you were facing before you found our solution?
2. How much money would you lose by not using our product?
3. How did our product help you eliminate risk or uncertainty? Describe a typical situation where you felt you did not have enough control because you did not have our solution.
4. How did our solution make you feel better about yourself, your job, or your family?

You can adapt these questions to match your situation, but as you can imagine, only a few discussion points can reveal critical areas of pains and frustrations that are at the core of why people will choose your solution. Note that if you are selling a product through resellers, you need to do this process twice, once for the end‐users and once for the resellers. To the extent that their areas of concerns vary, you will find that you need to change your message to stimulate the primal brains of each target group.

Domino's Pizza

The pizza delivery business seems straightforward and highly commoditized. You would think that to be successful in this activity; you need to focus on making a good pizza. However, very early on, Domino's didn't focus its main claim on the pizza. They focused on solving a critical pain: the anxiety of not knowing when the pizza will arrive (Figure 5.4).

This strategic decision is at the center of Domino's success, not just in the United States but outside as well. Today, Domino's Pizza is the first largest pizza restaurant chain in the world (Pizza Hut is the second!), with more than 14,400 locations in over 85 markets. They are like the Federal Express of the pizza industry: the pizza delivery experts! The pizza itself is important but it's not the key differentiator for Domino's Pizza.

For many years their slogan was: “30 minutes or less, or it's free.” Notice how it provides a perfect cure to the pain!

Starbucks

Meanwhile, you may think of Starbucks as the company that gives you the drinks you want. However, the success of their mission is because they realized that people spend most of their time at home and in the office. Yet people experience the pain of missing a transitional environment that helps them switch mentally from their home mode to their office model. The founder and former CEO of Starbucks, Mr. Schultz positioned the business as an ideal third place.

The “third place” is like a decompression chamber, the home away from home, the workplace away from the workplace (Figure 5.5). That positioning has made Starbucks unique and very successful in over 70 countries and over 24,000 locations because it solves a major pain for millions of people every day.

Uber

Meanwhile, another company that did not even exist 10 years ago built an empire by targeting pains many of us share: going from one point to another quickly and cost‐effectively without owning a vehicle. How many of us have been frustrated waiting for a cab not knowing exactly when it would arrive? and have you not wondered when you would get to your destination and if you would have enough cash to pay for the ride (Figure 5.6)? Today, Uber operates in 84 countries, has over 160,000 drivers and holds a market value of $70 billion, while not owning one car.

For the preceding examples, winning market share was not just a function of offering products or solutions, but performing a good diagnosis of the underlying pains. Table 5.2 helps you appreciate the power of making a crucial distinction between marketing what customers want and marketing to their pains.

Pain Cluster Studies

The process of diagnosing pains typically involves two steps:

1. Qualitative exploration, achieved by conducting pain dialogues
2. Quantitative measurements, done through telephone or online surveys

The best way to organize pain data is to perform a pain cluster analysis. The concept is challenging to understand from a mathematical standpoint, but the purpose of the technique is to classify survey respondents (sometimes called segments or clusters) that share common patterns of responses on pain questions that are most predictive of future purchasing behavior. At SalesBrain, we have performed hundreds of such studies and what we have found will not surprise you: pain questions are always the most powerful questions to create segments of customers that have common patterns of consumer behavior.