Vitamins are nice to have.  They’re good for your health.  But when you have a headache, you need an aspirin.  It’s a must-have.  In an article in this month’s Fast Company magazine, Dan Heath and Chip Heath discuss turning vitamins into aspirin.  Changing the market’s perception of your product from “nice-to-have” to “must-have” can mean the difference between success and failure.

Netflix is an example of a company that did just that.  When Netflix started out, its fee structure was the same as Blockbuster’s: you paid a fee for each movie you rented, and if you didn’t mail it back within a few days, you’d rack up late fees.  Sales were weak.  But the business turned around when Netflix eliminated late fees and moved to their subscription model.  That was the “aspirin” that eliminated the “pain” of the late fees.

Another example: NetApp was offering digital storage to large companies. Their offer wasn’t significantly different than their competitors.  They were a little cheaper, but that wasn’t an important enough motivator for their prospects to switch to them.  NetApp conducted in-depth research with its existing clients, and discovered that reliability and redundancy were their urgent needs.  For them, lower prices were a vitamin, but reliability and redundancy were an aspirin.  NetApp responded by creating storage systems in pairs so that if one failed, the twin could take over. And they built in enough redundancy that even if a data center burned down, the client’s data would still be safe.  Their business from enterprise clients shot up.

When marketers get too close to their products, it’s easy to mistake a vitamin for an aspirin!  How can you make sure your target market regards your product as an aspirin rather than a vitamin? Learn about what’s important to your prospects.  Ask about their pain points.  Find out how your customers actually use your product and why.

To learn about your market’s “must-haves,” give us a call at (818) 752-7210.

Source: “Turning Vitamins Into Aspirin: Consumers and the ‘Felt Need,’“ Fast Company, November, 2010