Probably the most common misconception about online business is the fact that you’re selling products.
Let’s say you think about creating a book, an online course, or, if you’re daring enough, you think about a membership site. And you mentally label this thing as a “product”. You even start to think at it in terms of a product. You line up a budget, you gather resources, set up a timeline and start building it.
But the truth is you’re not selling products. You don’t have, in the traditional sense of a product, a factory that delivers something in a repetitive way. You don’t have a production line that consumes materials, aggregates work from various sources and produces a similar outcome every 2 minutes, just like Ford did when he started the car revolution, with his famous model T.
Or, even if you have it, it’s not that the thing you’re actually selling.
In the online business, what users are buying is very different. You sell an entire experience and not just an isolated product. And this experience is always the one that triggers the buying impulse.
In the old days, the buying impulse was triggered by a certain need at a certain moment and then, when the context was favorable, the buying process was actually initiated and completed. Think about furniture. I need to buy a sofa. I decided to pud aside some money and I will buy it when the context will be favorable (smaller prices for sofas, a bonus from work, whatever).
Nowadays, the buying impulse may be triggered way before the user is even thinking to buy something. I know it sounds strange, but that’s the truth. Think about “Inception”, the movie, and you’ll be one step closer to this.
The actual need is now replaced by what I call “brand affinity”, or, in other words, by the experience someone gets from affiliation with a certain brand (or persona, or idea), being it validation, a certain social status and so on.
For instance, I’m pretty sure nobody really wants to buy an iPhone 7 right now, just because it fills a need, like a new sofa in your bedroom. If you look at it this way, it’s clear that’s not a very wise investment. There’s simply not enough technological advance and feature packing to justify the acquisition. Your old "sofa" is still working great.
Yet, many of you will buy an iPhone 7 because of the validation you get (“brand affinity”). You’ve been “programmed” to do this from the first acquisition of an iPhone, years ago. You claimed your identity as being one of the cool guys riding on the disruptive wave of innovation (the first iPhone was truly innovative) and you will continue to do this, to reinforce your own identity, with little attention paid to the product in its current state. As long as it keeps giving you the same feeling and as long os it worked moderately well, you will continue to buy the iPhone.
Don't get me wrong, I think the iPhone is still a good tool, but if the buying decision should be influenced only by the need for a smartphone, then you can safely buy other, much cheaper smartphones.
The main ingredient in the whole package that your client buys is how your product is making them feel.
Is your product making them feel smarter? Nicer? More secure? They feel like a better person when they're exposed to your stream of information?
If you can isolate the experience you made them have and if you can recreate it on a consistent basis, then you nailed a big part of the process. Probably the most important part.
Of course, you can throw in some old school items to complete the experience, like an ebook or a course. But do not be fooled: without the whole story behind it, without the charismatic Steve Jobs and without Apple computers and iTunes and iPod, the iPhone - as a pure object - will be just a very expensive piece of technology. It will probably sell at 50-70$, just a tiny fraction over the production cost (the main production cost for an iPhone will be even lower, but I also included some R&D, storage and transportation to come up with that figure). The rest of the gap, until 600-700$ is the value of the perceived experience of having an iPhone, it’s that something you derive not from the product itself, but from the story that brought you to the product.
It’s how it makes you feel. And that thing is more of a process mixed with emotion, than a product, in the traditional sense of the word.
So, as a writer on Steem, take some time - from time to time - to ask yourself: how exactly am I making my readers feel? What is the actual experience I am creating? What is the buying impulse that I want to trigger, where am I actually creating it and how can I satisfy it later on? Is there an actual product that I’m selling, like a book or a course? Or it is just the experience of my readers consuming my writing?
In the context of a platform like Steem, where the entire micro-economy is backed up by a crypto-currency, things are even more complicated.
I didn’t even touch this specific topic, but I’m sure some of you will want to chip in with a comment or two.
This article is part of a 30 days writing challenge. Get all the articles here.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running.
