A Wren Says

We’re taking this journey through the 4 customer roles. Today’s stop is the user. And yes, if you did your product design right, they love it and are telling all of their friends. But there are still some more things for you to consider.

The user’s focus is acceptability. How well does your product fit their needs. And they are going after two types of value: performance and socioemotional value. The first is explanatory. Does your product perform as expected? Does it do the thing you said it would do? Does it meet the need the customer was trying to fill? This here is where your product design comes into play. But people buy things to fill needs greater than functionality. Your user is likely also trying to find some kind of value that fills a social or emotional need as well.

Here is when you have to get at the deeper why. If you are a clothing designer, you would need to look beyond whether your work fills the basic need and to what wearing your clothes could do for a person. Are you offering luxury, comfort, practicality? When a teenage girl is buying one of your homecoming dresses, is she just buying a sparkly dress or is she also buying a little bit of confidence for when she takes her crown?

When you get deeper into why people use your products (or just your product category) you can design better. But, perhaps as importantly, you can create better messaging to address your consumer needs and in turn leave them more satisfied.

Thinking about those who use your products, how can you better communicate how your products meet their needs? What emotional or social needs does your product fill beyond the functional uses?

Source used:

Sheth, J. N. & Sisodia, R. S. (2019). The four A’s of marketing. In Marketing Wisdom. K. Kompell. Ed. Springer.