5 Little Reasons Why No One Is Buying Your Superior Product
You're product is better in every way: Better materials, more features, lower cost. So why are people still buying your competitor's overpriced crap?
Fairness is a value we all share. We may disagree on what’s fair, but not on the fact that everyone’s got a personal fairness meter — and it goes berserk when we think it’s been violated.
Which is hilarious, because the world is objectively unfair. It rains on the just and unjust alike.
Meritocracy is one of the stickier illusions. We like to think the fastest runner wins the gold, the smartest become doctors, and hard work is rewarded while laziness gets punished. We cling to this belief even after watching it fail… again and again.
Fairness is an invention. A comforting bedtime story we tell ourselves about the way the world should work.
So when your clearly superior product flopped, your sense of justice was inflamed.
How could people reject what’s obviously the best? Are they idiots?
Masochists who enjoy being abused by corporate overlords?
No.
You screwed up. You just haven’t figured out how yet.
1. People don’t buy the best. They buy what they see.
For decades, every weekly grocery trip, I bought Diet Pepsi. Never Diet Coke. Never Coke Zero. Never off-brand.
Why?
Because Pepsi carpet-bombed my brain with ads in my youth. It’s good enough, and I stuck with it.
Did I scientifically compare every cola in the world? Nope.
Is Pepsi objectively the best? Who knows. Who cares.
Visibility beats quality. Every time.
2. You’re giving reasons when you should be setting examples.
Every parent knows: you can lecture your kids until your lungs give out — they’ll still follow your example over your words.
Same with customers.
In Mad Men, Don Draper saves his tobacco account with “It’s toasted.” Supposedly genius. But in the real world? The Marlboro Man won.
No quality claims. No price advantage. Just a nameless cowboy riding into the sunset.
The image was the message.
3. You’re selling logic. They’re selling identity.
Features, benefits, ROI, discounts… all logical. Which would work great if people were logical.
They’re not.
Your competitor is selling a lifestyle, a tribe, a badge, a story people can wear. Even the most spreadsheet-obsessed buyer secretly wants to show off how smart they are — which is an emotional need dressed up as rationality.
4. You’re waiting for meritocracy to show up.
It’s not coming.
In the real world, the loud beat the quiet genius every time. Do you really think politicians win elections on merit? If we don’t choose our leaders rationally, why would you expect anything different when it comes to our purchasing decisions?
Yes, there’s honor in quietly being the best. We sing songs about it. Write books about it. Produce films about it.
But there’s profit in being the loudest.
5. People copy first, rationalize second.
René Girard called it mimetic desire: we want what we see others want. We’re pattern-recognition machines looking for someone else’s pattern to follow.
When I discovered punk rock as a teenager, I thought I was breaking free. Rejecting conformity. Giving the finger to society.
Then we all competed for the tallest mohawk, the most ripped jeans, the most safety pins, the most tattoos… and in our rebellion, we conformed to the anti-conformity uniform.
We all do this. Your customers too.
The hard truth
Your product isn’t losing because it’s worse. It’s losing because you’re invisible, forgettable, and copy-proof.
The winners aren’t the best. They’re the most imitated. They give people a behavior to model, not a spec sheet to read.
Stop trying to deserve the sale.
Start showing people how to be the kind of person who buys from you.
Because in the real marketplace, the crown doesn’t go to the superior product.
It goes to the best example.