There's a famous TED talk (and book) by Simon Sinek that was all the rage in the early 2010s.
Sinek's whole message was:
People don't buy what you do they buy why you do it.
Here's the ~20 minute talk if you want to watch it — it's worth the time to get a sense of what Sinek means and to see some of his examples:
Whose why
I have always thought Sinek is a good speaker, and a tremendous writer.
But while this message has something compelling about it, it has always sat a little uncomfortably for me.
For a while, I wondered if the issue was me. Surely I can't think Simon Sinek — New York Times best-selling author and world-renowned expert on such matters — could be wrong?!
But the issue with this concept, for me, has always been around the “why”.
Consumers absolutely consider “why” when making a buying decision. But from everything I've seen, people rarely give a damn about why you do something.
People buy because of why they want something.
It's the nuance of just a word, but I believe it changes everything.
TiVo as an example
Sinek seems to reinforce my point here. In the talk he uses TiVo as an example of a business that didn't figure their "why" out and failed in the market, despite having a great product.
In the talk he's suggesting people would have bought TiVo in droves if they understood why they would want it. Not because of some glorious raison d'être of TiVo itself.
First-hand experience of the nuance
We find this ourselves with EcoSend. We have a clearer answer to "why we do what we do" than we've ever had for our work on GoSquared, or other projects. While this is compelling to some, it pales in comparison to being explicitly clear on answering "why does the customer need this?".
Answering that is just categorically more important, and without it, you're stuffed. And I've got the battle scars to show for that...
Yes, this applies to Apple
Today, Apple released the new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display. It's a ridiculously long and ugly name if you ask me, but the two biggest new features are that it has a touch screen and a glowing Apple logo (again!) on the back. Lovely!
The missing piece for me, from today's MacBook Pro announcement, and for the HomeView announcement, and to a lesser extent the iPhone Duo announcement, is the clarity of the why.
Why do I need this product? Why do I need a touch screen on my laptop? It may not be for me, but why does anyone? And is it worthy of the trade-offs? Does it actually make sense? Why does this product exist?
I don't mean to hate on the new MacBook Pro. Far from it. It just seems that many businesses follow Apple's lead when it comes to marketing. And Apple's approach used to be to explain why.
Why oh why is the why so difficult?
It strikes me that the majority of introductions lately are really pitched as “Introducing this thing you already have (and know you need) that is now a little bit better”.
It leads to phrases like "the best phone we've ever made" and "3x faster graphics". These are great to answer why you want the new version of the thing you already know you need.
But when something actually new comes along, it's important to communicate why customers might need it.
I am not hearing so much of that these days.
And I don't think it's due to poor marketing or communication. I think it's because, fundamentally, there is a big question about whether many of these products and features actually need to exist.
People don't buy what you do. They buy why they need it.