For years on end, brands have flooded consumer channels with their unique selling proposition – our product does this well, our services are without compare and so on.
With the advent of social media, every consumer is now a publisher, and they have flooded channels with how they feel, think, like or loathe. This has given brands that “listen” an ability to tweak their USP to the unique buying proposition of consumers. If the anomaly between the criteria used by a consumer when buying and the priority used by a brand is narrowed, the chances of converting visitors to customers goes up dramatically.
Every day, we humans interact with others. We buy and sell things. Negotiating is never easy except for the stubborn! When you think about buying or selling anything is there a simple framework one can use to show value, stay balanced and make the right decisions.
It is easy to remember – PQRST. It stands for:
Price, Quality, Risk, Scope and Timeframes.
Let’s chat about each one –
Price: its importance is self-evident. Everything we buy must fall within our budget and everything we sell must be priced fairly.
Quality: Also, very important. The higher the quality of your product or service the more you can charge. Apple phones, as an example, is a high-quality product so you can see it is priced appropriately as a premium phone.
Risk: If you are buying a product which has a no-returns policy or does not offer any form of warranty or if the reviews it has on trusted public forums are no good, it would be a risky purchase. The lower the risk the higher the price.
Scope: The scope of an offering (product or service) is how many features you pack into a deal. If you are buying a car, does it come with leather seats or cloth upholstery? Does it have heated seats or not? The more you pack into your product the better.
Timeframes: If you score well on P Q R and S you may still not be selected if you say you will deliver the product or service after 3 months when the client wants it in 3 days and a competitor can do that.
If a brand marketer thinks about finding the right balance between the 5 parameters – PQRST – you might find making decisions on buying and selling a bit easier.
At our agency, Boldest, we’ve created a product called Pathway that takes a step towards optimizing the PQRST equation to reduce cart abandonment. Come speak with us and we can explore some ideas together.
