When it comes to marketing, one thing is sure; you will never see your product or service in the same way that one of your consumers will. This is, unfortunately, inevitable.

Pretty much everything you do for your business is a deliberate action, you think about what you’re doing and the reasons for it (at least I hope you do).

As a result of this you will look at the elements you offer and consider them. Most of the time you have had to think about them to have them be there in the first place.

But this doesn’t mean you are always mindful of how small details can be significant to consumers. For example the background in the picture of the car you’re selling may well convey an awful lot of information to a prospective customer either at a conscious or unconscious level.

But the seller, having dutifully cleaned his car is only looking at how smart the vehicle looks, not what’s going on around it. If he did consider the background his familiarity with it means he would see it quite differently anyway.

Which of these cars would you want to buy if everything else was equal?

Assuming the red Golf works, it wouldn’t have taken very long to drive it to a more scenic backdrop, snap a picture and take it back home. Even just opening the curtains to reflect the usual daytime practice might have been an idea.

When it comes to understanding how prospective customers see your product one of the most important issues is how simple it is to make the purchase.

• How easy is it to understand what’s on offer?
• How obvious is it what they have to do?
• How simple is it to choose from any options provided?
• How clear is it what will happen next?

When customers get confused, for example if they are presented with a wide number of choices, they are likely to respond in one of two ways:

1. Defer the decision – meaning that they will quite often either not buy at all or buy from somebody else.
2. Default to establish behaviour – selecting the product that they’ve always selected before (even if there are aspects of it with which they’re unhappy).

Option two is okay if you’re an established business with an established customer base, at least it is in the short-term. These customers not likely to be happy about the choices they’ve made if anything goes wrong subsequently.

So it is well worth taking a moment to check how simple it is to buy from you.

Now at this point, you may well be thinking that the smart thing to do (since you can’t look at your own product environment objectivity) is to ask a friend or a customer how easy they find the experience.

In the first instance, if you ask a friend to help you them they will not be interacting with your product in the way that a real customer would.

They won’t have the need that your customers are trying to meet and, more importantly, theyare risking nothing: if they make a bad choice there will be no pain for them in the future.

In the second instance, if you ask a customer about their experience, they will be unable to tell you how easy or difficult they found the process of choosing.

What they will tell you is how easy or difficult they think they found it with hindsight on the basis of what they ultimately did.

Therefore it’s likely that if you ask a consumer who ended up purchasing from you, they will say that the process was straightforward. What they really mean is that the process musthave been straightforward because they managed to buy.

If you ask a consumer who didn’t buy from you, they will post rationalise far more psychologically self-protective reasons than them being too stupid to figure out what to do or what to choose!

Instead, they will construct a reason like, “You didn’t have what I was looking for” or “I wasn’t ready to buy, I want to think about it a bit more” and so on.

The problem with purchase process complexity is that it creates a feeling in the customer’s unconscious mind something is uncomfortable and that pushes them away from making a purchase.

Our caveman brain associates uncertainty with fear and risk. It knows the smart thing to do in situations like that is just to get out of there.

So how are you to know how easy or difficult you’re making it for your customers. There are two options:

1. Experiment with different approaches, for example the number of products you offer, the way in which you present them, the structure and layout you use, etc. and see when you sell more and when you sell less.
2. Evaluate what you’ve offered and how you’ve offered it in the light of this information. If you can develop the skill of abandoning your preconcieved ideas of what’s right before you appraise it you will learn much more.

It can be helpful at this stage to ask someone who isn’t involved in the day-to-day operation why they think one thing has been more successful than another.  Yes, you’re guessing to some extent.

I guarantee that you have more chance of being right this way than if you ask a consumer to evaluate the sales process.

Watch customers as they buy your product and observe their behaviour. If you know what to look for you can detect signs of uncertainty, anxiety (cognitive dissonance) and hesitation.

This is a slightly more difficult skill to acquire but one that can help shortcut the process and save time and money in the long run.

Image courtesy: Lali Masriera