We're still trying to solve problems that no longer matter to buyers

Too many businesses are still trying to solve problems that stopped mattering to buyers more than a decade ago. We're obsessing over product quality in markets where everything already works. For instance, look at your own experience and tell me, when was the last time you bought something that when you tried to use it, you discovered it didn't switch on? Quality in manufacturing and QC has reduced the chances of us buying a lemon, to virtually zero, right? Yet many of us continue to optimize across dimensions that buyers have stopped caring about. Take product features as an example. In established categories, trying to differentiate a product based upon some newfangled feature buys us weeks, possibly months at best, right, before competitors have their own version, and all of a sudden we're back to square one again. We spend most of our time benchmarking technical details that matter to product teams and pretty much no one else. Buyers can't tell the difference between our widget and the competitor's widget because functionally there isn't one. Building a better mousetrap is no longer the path to business growth. In categories where products work reliably, buying decisions are now made around different criteria. They have to in order to make any real sense or at least maintain the illusion of neutrality in a purchasing or procurement decision. So what are these new criteria? They're things that we had previously dismissed as being irrelevant to the buying experience— things like brand familiarity, the ease of purchase, or whether something feels trustworthy or accessible. Now, these kinds of things are no longer afterthoughts. Of course, product teams, developers, and those engineering types absolutely hate this, right? They've spent their careers perfecting features and shaving milliseconds off load times or adding capabilities that look really cool in a demo, but that the average user would never ever use. But these so-called improvements do nothing more than maintain parity. They keep us in the game, but they don't provide us with the tools to win it. Hours are spent in executive meetings on specification comparisons, features, performance metrics, technical advantages that sound impressive to us, but they mean absolutely nothing to buyers. Think about major purchases in your category. How often did the decision come down to purely features? Now, there may be an occasion where not having some particular feature excludes us from some enterprise sales RFP, but even here The technical evaluation usually exists as nothing more than a justification to make a decision that in reality was made for totally different reasons. What many businesses may not like to hear is that most RFPs are actually rigged from the start. The prospect already knows what they want even before the RFP is sent out, but they need to play this 3-quote game rule and have procurement get involved in order to satisfy some legislative requirement or conformance laws. But anyway, I'm going off the point, and the point is that features and fit for purpose just get us through the door. Buyers are using non-technical influences to direct their buying choices. They buy because they trust the brand, or because someone had a good sales experience, or even more likely in a B2B environment, because somebody felt more confident that they wouldn't get fired if they chose the least risky, safer-looking option. Buyers don't weigh features against price in the way that economists suggest. The better product doesn't automatically win. In mature markets, where pretty much any product will do the job, decisions get made on messier, more emotionally influenced criteria. The people closest to the manufacturer of the product, the ones who understand technical details better, often have the least influence, and indeed accountability, on the growth of the business. At the same time, teams working on brand, positioning, and customer experience are constantly fighting for budget and are first in line when sales don't reach expectations. In other words, product development is funded like it's the primary differentiator, while marketing gets funded like it's an overhead. I suppose you could excuse that ratio back in the days when products would arrive at a customer DOA, meaning dead on arrival. You could create that manufacturing bias when products were unreliable, hard to use, or frequently broke down. But this isn't the case anymore. Breakthrough innovations still matter, of course they do. Something genuinely new that no one else can do, that has the potential to change the fundamental way we do or make something. That category-defining product that comes along once in a while that drives growth from a genuinely totally new direction. But the reality is most of us don't operate in that situation, do we? Most of us compete in established categories with established competitors using established technologies. Marginal returns on product improvement have diminished. We fight over the last 5% of performance in markets where our buyers are already perfectly satisfied with the speed and features and whatever they already have. Growth now comes from how we talk about the product, how we sell it, and how we make people feel about choosing it. I'm not saying that substance no longer matters and marketing can now do all the work. What I'm saying is that in markets where products work and any functional differences between them are minimal at best, perception becomes substance. The brand that feels trustworthy is more valuable in the buyer's mind than the product that's 3% faster. The frictionless buying experience matters more than some feature most users have, have never even wanted in the first place. What influences decisions once the functional basics are covered? We act like we're in a world where product quality varies wildly and everything else is secondary. But we left that world years ago. Businesses growing in these mature categories have shifted resources and their focus. They've had to. They've changed how we think about competitive advantage. It's not like they're ignoring product. They've realized that product can no longer be left to do the heavy lifting on its own. We're still benchmarking processor speeds or making feature matrices, while buyers are choosing based on how easy it was to find the information on the website. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, please pass it on. I'm not saying I'm right, I'm saying many out there are wrong. Please subscribe, share, comment, whatever works for you. Find out more at kexino.com. That's K-E-X-I-N-O. Hope to see you again here soon.