If You Don’t Tell People 'Why', They’ll Tell You Why Not

Throughout our Reason Why blog series, we’ve talked about how important it is to identify your Reason Why: why prospects should care enough to choose you over worthy options.

Here’s another reason: if you don’t, consumers will concoct a reason why they should NOT consider you.

The explanation for this human quirk is that our brains are fundamentally lazy.

In fairness, our brain does have a lot on its mind.

For instance, you may believe that you are just comfortably sitting there, digesting this blog. That doesn’t sound very stressful, now does it?

But your brain is doing more than pondering these words. It is busy processing 400 billion (that’s billion with a b!) bits of information a second and simultaneously managing over 1,000 different functions. Talk about multitasking!

As marketers, so caught up are we in how wonderful our product is, we conveniently forget that our customer has already chosen and is loyal to something else: our competitor’s product.

When we ask a customer to buy a product, we are fundamentally asking them to question an earlier decision. And the human brain does not have the time or energy to reconsider a perfectly fine earlier decision. And hence, our product.

According to the book First is Best, a century’s worth of research has shown that what we experience first is remembered better, engenders greater attachment, and is seen as “better” 62% of the time. More telling, what is seen second, is perceived not as less “better” but as “worse.”

Of the thousands of thoughts we have in a day, it is estimated that 70% of this mental chatter is negative — self-critical, pessimistic, and fearful.

In other words, we are emotional wrecks.

Do you know who reads the most car reviews? No? People who have just bought a car. What these readers are doing is looking to defend their decision.

They don’t want to face the possible truth that they made the wrong decision. That they made a mistake.

It is this human insecurity that helps support existing purchase decisions and why customers think bad thoughts about other options. Or, in other words, why they think they should not consider other products.

The way out of this conundrum is to focus not on your “what” and “how” (what you do and how you do it), which won’t be very persuasive to a busy brain. Instead, focus on a compelling Reason Why that breaks through to the emotional side of the brain. That’s the subject of our next blog.