Anxiety-driven value propositions:
What product-centered anxiety means for your business
and what to do about it
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Getting potential customers to buy your product or service can sometimes be an enduring battle. It’s common to look at motivations, goals, needs, expectations and desired outcomes in design, sales and marketing. In other words, the forces creating demand for products and services.
It is indeed important to take these factors into account, but there is so much more going on in our heads when considering changing to a new solution. In fact, the real potential for increasing acquisition, adoption and retention lies within the forces reducing demand for products and services.
At the center of this thought is the psychological forces compelling and opposing change. The new, flashy features of a product is only a tiny part of the descision-making process a customer goes through when switching to new solution.
Habits of the existing solution and anxiety of adopting a new one is often overlooked.
Anxiety is in particular a roadblock on the path progressing towards a new solution. And it is often silent.
Understanding anxiety
Before we jump into what you can do about it, let’s examine what forces are at play when customers consider new solutions, and thus how anxiety affects customer choice.
In the moment of choice, there are always two opposing forces battling for dominance; the forces compelling change to a new solution and those that oppose change.
The forces promoting change to a new solution
There are two forces pushing and pulling customers to change solutions. These are also called the demand-generating forces.
It all starts with a push, a frustration with the current solution. Something that makes the customer think “this isn’t working for me.” It might not be enough that the struggle is simply…
