March 30th, 2007
Thoughts on Seth Godin’s Joy/ Cash Curve
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Seth Godin’s Joy/ Cash Curve shows that for many products, the more you pay, the less fun the buying is.
The Y-axis here is actually ‘Net Joy’ or ‘Total Joy minus Total Pain’. While increasing the ‘Joy Factor’ may help a little, the problem, and the solution, lies in the ‘Pain Factor’.
The purchase process for high-ticket-size products like cars or houses is painful typically because of three reasons - the length of the purchase cycle, the amount and complexity of paperwork and the tendency to undercut the main product and make money on the extras.
I don’t think that entertaining the customer, as Seth Godin suggests, will solve the problem. Making the purchase process shorter, more transparent and more off-the-shelf will.
Agreed. But it also comes down to classic consumer behavior patterns. For instance, the Indian psyche is such that any big investment is a huge production of advice gathering, strongly debating if and when to go ahead and the actual haggling. Perhaps its the societal conditioning that “they” are out to get us/cheat us or that the “I” needs to pull off the best deal ever!
My point? I remember my uncle bought a car. The salesman was great. He said he wouldn’t want to haggle and waste everyone’s time, instead he quoted an amount which worked for everyone. After coming home though, mu uncle was tormented for the next 3 days thinking he must have been conned. why did he agree so easily? Or may be the price could’ve gone lower?
On the other hand, I remember my dad buying his car..He made several trips over a couple of days..argued/haggled over everything and everything and then some. And when he did get his car, there was this immense joy of finally having gotten a great deal.
Consumers are complex. Sometimes you need to stage a production and not all textbook solutions work!
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Apologize for the long rambling comment and thanks for the link at DP!
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@Perspective Inc: All you can do as a marketer, therefore, is to make the ‘deal’ as transparent as possible - one fixed everyday low price inclusive of the extras - and then communicate it to build customer confidence over time. I ‘know’ the reasons why it doesn’t always happen in the real world - because your customers and competitors are deal-oriented, because you need to maximize on seasonal spikes, because you need to report monthly/ quarterly numbers - but, maybe, there’s value in it in the long term.
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