We are told in almost everything we read to do with sales and marketing to target a customers needs and then fill it. All the stats we collect tend to be to this end and rightly so however sometimes this approach can lead you to make some false assumptions which could cost you time, money and potentially lost revunue. This post looks at whether need or desire should be catered to.

Many times when we target customers through need we sometimes miss signals that clearly raise there head for the type of customer we should be looking to attract. This problem normally starts with the perception of which niche to market to and how. Generally most people go into their business with the preconcieved notion of who their customer is or who has the need and thus market to what they believe the need to be rather than who has the desire to buy.

Needing something is not the same as desiring something or desire to buy something i.e. I needed a laptop but the new ipad was far more desirable, it was new, hip and cool, hence my purchase of the final product was based on my desire. My desire outweighed my need, the ipad was sexy the laptop well, it was a laptop, functional in everyway but it was the wow factor of the ipad that made me buy it.

The difference was very clear and this is what you need to identify in your marketing and sales process, it is the desire to take action that you really need to target not the need to buy. How you choose your market is very important as this is the first step to getting this process of need V desire correct. If you get this part wrong it does not matter how good your product or service is, how great your content is – people pretty much will not buy what you are offering.

If you get 100 people to your site how have a need and only 1 person purchases you have not achieve a good sales to advertising ratio, however if you target the people who are willing to take action through desire to buy and only 10 of these people come to your site and 2 buy then you have achieve a good ratio. In essence desire to take action can potentially outweigh need to purchase.

To help yourself understand this process you need to do your research slightly differently instead of looking for who needs something, look for information on how are buying similiar products or services, how often they buy, who they are they buying from and getting access to this information is not hard regardless of whether you sell your products or service online or offline.

By doing this type of research you can position your business and marketing in such a way as to take advantage of desire rather than need. However your best bet would be to target desire and need as this is possible to do but using slightly different marketing campaigns for the same product.

By taking advantage of the desire to take action instead of only targeting need you are more likely to have a profitable and highly successful marketing and sales campaign.

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