Marketers obsess over what customers love, but miss the bigger picture: negative perceptions drive buying decisions more than positive ones. When customers can't find a clear winner, they pick the least bad option. Understanding dislikes matters as much as understanding likes.
Chapters
We talk a lot about customer experience or customer satisfaction, but we don't seem to talk very much about customer dislike, even though it's an influence factor in buying decisions. Of course, we need to find out what customers love, crave, and enjoy about what we sell and how we sell it, but shouldn't we also know what they don't like? The list of reasons why they don't like our offering is as big a determinant factor to sale as what they love. Faced with buying decisions, customers are often put into a position of choosing the least bad, since they don't see any real best. As marketers, until we truly understand the wider consideration space and purchase influences, both negative and positive, we can only ever address part of what we're being paid to do. It's not just about doubling down on what makes customers love us, it's also about reducing things they dislike.