Why do people buy? And why do people buy what they buy?
The answer to these two questions is crucial for companies that base their performance on an outside-in model; that is, they focus on understanding the needs of the market to better serve it.
To truly understand customer motivation requires recognizing that the product or service that the company offers means a benefit to them and that this is an important part of what they buy.
The company is dedicated to solving customer requirements, satisfying their needs, offering them a set of benefits that mean added value. These benefits can be offered to more than one market segment and through more than one product or service. Customer motivation is the link between supply (product) and demand (market).
In general terms, customer motivation occurs in at least two different stages, which we must separate. The first has to do with recognizing a need in general and the second with choosing a particular satisfier.
An individual may decide to drink something to quench their thirst, then choose one of several beverage options, and finally decide on the brand and presentation.
To distinguish between needs, motives and benefits, the best help is found in the hierarchy of needs that Abraham Maslow proposed in his 1954 book 'Motivation and Personality'.
Maslow proposed that human beings rank their needs from the most to the least pressing (physiological, security, social, esteem and self-fulfillment) and that they dedicate time and effort first to a need of lesser hierarchy, which, once Satisfied she will cease to be a motivator to give way to a need of the next level. When a person has enough water, food and shelter, they will begin to worry about their safety, their social, emotional needs, etc.
At the first level of the Maslow scale, it is very easy to associate a state of tension with the physiological needs of water, food and housing, which is generated when the requirement is not being met. Lack of water or food generates a state of tension that we respectively call thirst and hunger.
Thus, we define need as requirement (water); Motivation as the state of tension that is generated when a need is not being fulfilled (thirst) and benefit as satisfaction, or the result of satisfying a need.
In fact, we don't have a specific word to refer to the benefit of drinking water. Quench thirst? Lack of rest (need) produces sleep (motivation) and sleep gives us the benefit of resting? It is a semantic game.
The real problem is in the following levels of the Maslow scale, because the state of tension is increasingly difficult to describe and to name. If the person needs to relate socially, how to call the state of tension that is generated when that need is not being met? Loneliness? How to call the benefit?
When we talk about certain products and services, we have serious problems because it is difficult to identify the benefits that your public looks for in them. Cigarettes, alcoholic beverages and coffee are three examples. In fact, the harm they cause could be greater than the benefit they provide.
We must ask ourselves some questions regarding the first decision stage. Why do people smoke? Why do you consume alcoholic beverages? Why are you using a checking account? Why are you studying a professional career? Why are you calling on the phone? Why do you connect to the internet? Why do you use a car? Toothpaste? Why do you go to the cinema?
And when we answer these, we should ask ourselves other questions. Why one brand of cigars and not another? Why get a company, among several possible? There are benefits that are obtained in this second stage, different from those that are sought in the first, and that are more related to the provider than to the satisfactor himself.
And of course there are many other questions. In addition to the question of why people do NOT buy, there are all those questions related to the decision process: people who intervene, information that is handled, sources where it is obtained, time that elapses, recurrence of the acquisition, etc., etc.
Understanding purchasing behavior is an important responsibility of the company, but it is not the only requirement imposed by the market approach, nor the most important. That 'deep knowledge of the client' is of little use if we just make a description, without raising other questions.
The next question is who buys? We must now find differences between people who smoke and those who do not smoke; among those who use the internet and not; those who go on vacation, those who go to the movies and so on.
Predicting purchasing behavior is an even more important task, and associating customer profile with that behavior is the first step in forecasting the decisions you will make.
We can say that with the understanding and prediction of purchasing behavior the first great task of a market-oriented company ends.
And since it is not enough to predict and cross our arms in the face of the imminence of a certain behavior, we must now modify the purchasing behavior, supported by our understanding and prediction of the decisions made by customers.
To the first great task of the company, understanding the customer is followed by the second, serving the customer.
The best way to link these two activities is through the use of purchasing behavior models, which can be conceptual in a first stage, the result of qualitative market research; descriptive, since quantitative research allows us to use numbers and percentages, and computerized, when we develop an algorithm that allows us to simulate what would happen if the company took certain initiatives.
Si una empresa no empieza por desarrollar un mapa mental acerca de la manera en que sucede el comportamiento de compra de sus clientes, difícilmente podrá hacer una adecuada descripción y predicción de sus ventas o participación de mercado, ya no digamos de sus utilidades. Pero peor aún, no tendrá la posibilidad real de tomar decisiones que modifiquen ese comportamiento de compra a su favor, mejorando dichos indicadores en la medida que se lo proponga.
