How to create products & services that people love

In this post, i’m gonna help you to build the perfect products and services so that your customers will love what you do. 

Now, all too often, marketing is the process that we put in place to sell the things that we’ve got, to the people that want it. That’s too vague and it’s just not helping you, in fact is killing off your business. What if we flipped it all around? What if we said hold on, we’ve got some people here, specific people with specific needs, and we want to provide a solution to them.

If we looked at it from the other side. If we actually said, ‘what is it that our customers need’ and developed products and services around that, rather than delivering products and services and hoping to venues marketing more and more marketing to deliver it, how much more effective would it be?

So in this post, i’m going to explore how we develop better products and services. We’ve already given away the clues. Of course, it’s all about understanding that customer.

It’s all about understanding the pain and the problems that they’ve got so that we can develop products and solutions for that specific problem. The first step in doing it of course, is understanding your avatar and i’ve got a separate post, all about understanding avatars. Put simply, it’s understanding who is this target customer? This ideal customer? And more to the point, what is it? What’s the pain that they’re in that they need you to come and solve? When we get really clear about the pain that they’ve got, the problem that they’ve got, we can get really clear about the solution.

We need to understand the solution first and build our products and services to support the solution. And it’s just a key way of flipping that thinking so that we’re not just trying to deliver the product first. 

There’s no better way of developing products and services, than asking your avatar. What is it that they need? So when was the last time you actually asked your customer exactly what they needed solving. What was their pain? What is their pain? You see the real importance on understanding the need more than anything else is because when we do that, not only can we build the product and service around it, we can talk about the need in our marketing.

So take a look now at most marketing, and it tries to sell a product. What we need to do is start selling the solution to a need. So we need to look at their need to be really, really clear about it. And that’s what we talk about within our marketing, our solution, to solve their need. Years ago, that would be called features and benefits.

From a technical point of view, you have a product or service that has some features. But of course, we used to sell one of the benefits of those features. Now i’d like to take that a step further and talk about the implied need. So, out of all of those features than benefits, what’s the implication?

Let’s take something very easy. An energy drink. The feature is that it gives you energy. It contains ingredients that will give you energy. The benefit is that now you don’t feel as tired of that. You’ve got more energy, but of course, what’s the implication? Because that’s the real thing. Well, you’re at work. You need to perform, but you’re feeling sluggish. Now, you’re able to do a better job because you’ve got the energy to focus because you took the energy drink.

Can you see how there’s three steps?

1. I’ve got ingredients that give you energy.
2. You’ll have energy rather than feel tired.
3. You’ll actually get your work done better because you’ve got the energy and it’s that third step.

It’s the implication. It’s the implied need that we need to focus on in our marketing.

All we need to do is look at the problem that you’re going to solve. This is a big thing. It’s the solution to a need. It’s not a solution. It’s a solution to a need.

Really focus on what is that need? What is that pain point for your customer? Get really clear about that, because in your marketing that’s what we’re going to talk about. We’re gonna talk about the need that you’re solving, not the product that you have.

WOuld you like help to create new products and services that customers will love? Use the form below to contact me and I would love to help.