What’s the Best Thing About Problems?
Every business solves a problem for their customers. It’s marketing 101. Sign up for a digital marketing course on Facebook ads, copywriting or sales and you’ll see this question right at the top of the course notes:
What problem do you solve for your customer?
According to conventional advertising knowledge, in order to sell someone a solution, you have to attack, highlight and turn the volume up on someone’s problem.
In the 1950s IBM developed their classic SPIN model for selling. It was part of their ‘fear-doubt flood’ technique. You work out your customers SITUATION. You find out their PROBLEM with this situation. You home in on the IMPLICATION of this problem. And you work out what they NEED.
Et voila. The customer has purchased £40K worth of hard drives because they’re worried that their data centre, cloud backup and local storage could all fail at the same time.
It lead to what we now know today as solution selling. It’s very much still part of the sales 101 playbook for sales copywriters and sales people getting off the first rung of the ladder.
To this day marketing works on providing solutions to customers’ problems. It might be a direct problem; for instance, you need a plumber because your house is filling up with water. Or it could be something subtler. You might need a sportscar because you can quite last as long in the bedroom. Who are we to judge?
Whatever your problem might be, advertising works by putting that problem into a cleverly worded headline. It uses photography that’s now so highly doused in digital accoutrements that it looks like it comes from a better world. And you’re left back on ground zero with a whole lot of want in your little old heart.
Remember clickbait advertising? It dominated the internet back in 2015. It was sophisticated enough to do all the heavy lifting in a single line. How many people felt they were missing out because:
Doctors didn’t want us to know this one, incredible secret
This woman spent £1,000 on a baby monitor. You won’t believe what happened next
Can you solve this puzzle? 95% of people get it wrong on the first attempt
Problems worry us. Problems get in our head and spike us. Even if the problem is simply that we want to know the answer to an inane, teasing comment where we know that the pay-off won’t meet the promise.
Marketeers and advertisers have always known this psychological mechanic. Back in the 1930s, copywriters would pepper their headlines with words like ‘want’, ‘need’ and ‘must’. As time progressed they’d call it ‘keeping up with the Joneses’. A now archaic reference that refers to the status anxiety one might feel if they were not doing quite as well as their metaphorical neighbours (i.e. the Joneses).
Take a backwards glance towards David Ogilvy’s masterpiece from the 1950s, On Advertising. He shoots straight at the target, down the sights of the Pareto principle, suggesting that 80% of customers decide whether to buy on your headline alone.
This hard sell has never gone away. Like everything in marketing, it hides behind different fashions. We like to pretend that this type of advertising has gone away. But go and check out any landing pages (or squeeze pages as they used to be known – for obvious reasons) and you’ll see it’s still rife in the industry.
Most of these landing pages work on a simple problem, solution, social-proof, call to action model. You’ll noticed that more often than not the headline opens with the problem the product or service will go on to solve.
Many young people will claim that the new wave of advertising, influencer culture, has kissed goodbye to these techniques. Au contraire, we exclaim, as in fact they are able to focus on customer problems in a much more visceral and targeted way. Social media can be deployed ruthlessly to show you a lifestyle and a way of living that is beyond you – a bright, world where everything is better. Better clothes, better people and better dates. And your problem? You’re not there.
And the more you focus on your customer’s problem, the worse you make it seem, the more you make them feel like they’re missing out by not having the solution; the better your conversion rate. Ramp up the pressure and count your millions.
Because many of the more common techniques are now common knowledge there’s an arms race to come up with a new and novel way to apply pressure so that the customer won’t realise what’s going on. From those adverts that follow you round the internet to Facebook showing you adverts that directly relate to a conversation you had with your mum, there’s always another angle. But if you can spot it how an advert or advertiser is doing it, then you’re too late to the party.
Many of the best businesses are created in response to a problem. Great businesses are often started by ex-employees of businesses who were tired of seeing things done badly. It’s become such a common trend that we even have a name for these companies. You’ll know it when you see it; disruptive.
The uninformed business person will often put too much pressure on an advert. They’ll believe that a really good piece of copy and design will make someone purchase something that they didn’t want. They’ll even worry that the copy is too hard…
But let me tell you a secret. Someone generally only wants to buy something new when the old something has broken down and no longer works. Unless we’re talking about my last girlfriend and shoes, of course. Or me and shoes, in fact. And this is why advertising is always about solving a problem…
Because if my old lawnmower still works, then I don’t want to buy a new lawnmower. The idea that a potential customer might be offended if my advert says “tired of your old lawnmower” is idiotic. A customer who is not tired of their old lawnmower certainly doesn’t want to buy a new one.
Next time you sit down to write out an advert. Ask yourself what’s your customers’ big problem. And don’t be afraid to focus on it. Because after all, if they don’t have the problem, they don’t need your solution.